I’ve won.
All the fountains are lit up
and all the trials I’ve been tasked with
are done. I’ve traveled the underworld,
cakes in hand; kept my coin
for the ferryman. I wandered in the dark,
cards close to my chest
and when the lost souls cried to me,
they didn’t know my real name.
I learned to keep my hands in the boat
and my eyes on the horizon,
following phosphorescence
from mushrooms and flagellates
and sometimes I just closed my eyes,
listening to the music glowing underwater,
humming from the inner earth.
I never made it out alone.
I died down there, broke the rules for love—
and it was love that followed me down
into the labyrinth, carried me piggyback
to the surface. My eyes looked into the sun
and blinked; it took time
to get used to being home.
This is all I ever wanted—
Words. Ears. A kitchen. Hands to play songs.
Light through a stained glass window.
Two arms around me, holding my soul in—
compressing me from all four corners of the galaxy
where my lonely stardust wandered,
into the dimensional portal of a kiss.
I’m descending like a meteor burning up
in the earth’s atmosphere, ready to take on
the sizzle and kaleidescope of of life
I’ve been hiding away from in deep space.
The atoms of me, dancing in sacred geometries
of the shapes my heart makes
to asborb all this light.
It’s an ordinary thing to love, to grow old;
to live and die by someone’s side.
It’s an ordinary thing to find your happy ending—
security, enough to eat. A hand to hold,
tethering you to the colors of this world.
The eventual price of grief and goodbyes.
We’re all just sand mandalas
feeding our songs to the river Styx.
This is the coin worth paying,
the passage worth taking.
It’s what we’re meant for.
Pay for your life with life
and give it all away.
We exist for today
and earn our wings
only when we learn the art of falling.
– Psyche Marks 2018