The Marrow

My words can sharpen this image -
or dull it into something I can survive.

I am too tired to choose.

They travel still, these words,
through corridors older than memory,
back to the womb that carried the being
that carried the soul
that carried the beginning
of who I am still trying to become.

And I;
I am left here,
holding the echo of origin
like a bone stripped clean.

There is a heaviness in knowing
that creation asks for so much breaking.

That to be made
is to be unmade,
again and again,
until even your voice feels borrowed.

Poetry, he used to say, is seeing beauty in its absence.

But they do not speak of the cost -
of how it lives in the hollow places,
how it feeds on what you cannot keep,
how it turns grief into structure
and calls it meaning.

Poetry is -
like any form of art;
the marrow in a functional society.

But marrow is hidden.
Marrow is taken.
Marrow is what remains
when everything else has been carved away.

And I am so tired
of being the bone
that must be broken
for something to feel alive.