Rich and vibrant soil,

Heavy with rain and dew,

Nurtures growth;

Eager seedlings

Endure and survive.

Long days filled with

Sunshine slip by

Until it begins anew,

Breaking and erupting

From earth’s foundation -

A commencement

Of nature and of birth.

Desiring, striving,

Branches proliferate,

Reaching high

To sun and sky,

Beautifully arrayed

In layers of

Veined, green leaves,

Prickly thorns, and

Sweet baby buds.

Lazy days of summer

Drift along.

New life unveils

Petals of

Robust, stark scarlet

Blooming amid a burst of light.

A portraiture of

Supple delicacy and beauty,

Distends from branches,

Complete with jagged

Thorns primed in a quest

To sting

The fragile veil of skin.

Therein lies the rub.

Secrets -

Beauty, empathy, knowledge,

Awareness, and perpetual growth -

Encompassed beneath a shell exquisite

Are oft’ derived

Amidst the pain and angst

Of a prickly thorn

Like whispered echoes

Of age-old bequests

Nestled within the arms

Of beauty’s valiance.

Cynthia Calder, 01.13.25

and still I maintain

having understood

only

what is meant by heel

underfoot or next to,

and the forgiveness

that entails, the loss, the gain

unburied from our roots

washed, and set to air

in light

as fingers of experience

wrap around

to squeeze

us

our food for the poor

traversing from the Americas

to Europe, Africa and Asia

then pressed upon

the world

and those who've tended our pain

with allergy to compulsion

have said, the botany of us

has a soul

a kin

on opening up

Spent our shells

chasing "when"

in youth,

and who knew, mother

phf! it would be the old

we'd fall in love with

01.16.2025

Khalil Gibran challenge @dctezcan

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. The question is whether the shell is one meant to be cracked, as in the shell of a nut or seed, or one wherein cracking means a broken spine, desiccation, certain death.

When the pain is of a specific kind, you know deep down, no matter how often you try to twist it into having a worth, your shell is that of a snail or turtle, and you are just dead meat waiting to be consumed. That pain brings you an understanding of what it feels like to know, to dread your own sibling’s hug because of what will follow. The understanding of what follows, of adulthood. Adulthood is knowing what’s happening and with it, knowing why you’re in pain, wishing that knowledge made it hurt less but it didn’t. Doesn’t.

You try to take your understanding and use it somehow, write your way out of the pain, write what it feels like to be beneath his hands, write what you struggle to put to words verbally, and no, the words aren’t jumping out to a literary audience either, they’re hiding themselves away. Maybe the pain didn’t bring you understanding at all, just another layer of separation between yourself and The World where siblings squabble and love each other but not in That Way. Not in That Way, and yet he only loves you when you’re under him, providing sensory stimulation, and what else can you do but do what he wants? What else can you do but pretend it isn’t pain at all?

The tears are from the winter wind whipping it’s way through your scarf, against your eyes, in no way related to too large hands and hushed breathes and “he doesn’t mean any harm” so no harm was done. No harm was done. No harm was done. You’re not in pain; you’re not real.

None of what happened to you really happened, so you’ll write about it two days later like it’s a story about understanding, like you’re a walnut shell, not a snail clinging desperately to your body-home. You understand. You’re not in pain, not when you read story after story about your favorite characters suffering the same way you did, not when you ask in a thinly veiled plea fic the author has experienced what they write about only to learn no, you really are alone, your suffering can be described even by those who don’t understand, are only imagining the pain of having their body used against them, their reactions excuses, their excuses justifications, those justifications signs you deserved it. You don’t have anyone telling you otherwise but these fiction authors imagining themselves in your reality, so you let yourself be comforted by mirages, let the Sun dry your snail skin from your cracked shell. Understand that nothing is real, not your pain, not you. Nothing.

A lesson to learn.An uncharted puzzling journey on a bridge to burn.

Brittle bones caught between today and tomorrow.Medicated destination unconfirmed.

Standing inside the torment and madness.Staring down the disarray.

Nocturnal waves shattering unforseen foundations,premeditated to delay.

We push through the unforseen.Our untimely choice we accept the unwarranted pain.

Falling into abysmal denial.Berthing and embarking into restless terrain.

Bullet holes and death

I know better than my therapist.

Stare at me before you diagnose me

Talk a little, hear my tales.

Matter of fact let me help you,

Pick you up from your pity stupor;

That abuse you’ve poured

Takes its toll .

Round six of this fight and

I’m floored.

You’ve toured my mind

What do you think?

Blood splattered on the ring

Think this congested chest

Is worth my end?

Tell me when I return.

I’ve learned to dodge and

Weave, roll if I have to

Take the abuse down low

With my guard up

Speak from your chair

I’ve had enough.

Cheap white beveled trim edges the line of the doorway,

and I step through it.

I think I like to believe it's the pathway into the beginning of the end.

Or maybe the end of the beginning.

Anywhere where 'Hell' might be,

Because 'Heaven' is a mystery.

A mystery to me.

I think-

I think I would like to believe that,

but really all I am doing is looking up at the big empty space around me.

Tight and narrow stairs cluster in the empty doorway,

splitting off down and up in either direction to tiny spaces I suppose we ought to occupy later.

With what? I cannot say.

All I know is that it's too empty for my aching heart,

but I step forward and drag my suitcase up the steps to deposit it there.

I think I do a little spin,

look around at the vaulted ceiling and question where I ought to be right now.

Here?

Am I welcome here?

Or will this place hate me as much as the last?

The place that threatens to tear me apart for its amusements as the people around me parade pieces of me to their newest patrons as trophies.

I shudder to imagine horrors of that reoccuring.

I don't have much left.

Not really... Not if I aim to keep myself from throwing myself off the roof,

or hitting that barricade on the side of the tall hillside and out into whatever sits below to catch the soon-to-be bits of me if I'm stupid enough to go.

"New." I murmur out to myself.

"New." I nod to myself.

It's all very new.

And I can nod to myself in confidence, knowing that the couch I'll be buying tonight will be where I curl up tonight.

My old friend is dead.

She can't meet me here to cover me up,

but I supposed that I didn't just lie on it later that night.

I cried instead.

Curled up and clutched my shoulder and sobbed into it,

because no one could hear me and if they did,

I'd muffle my face in the cushions so passerby people couldn't hear it echo off my barren walls.

Oh so lonely.

Oh so fucking lonely.

I am alone.

And I hate how alone I am,

because my friends are dead.

The ones that keep my out of my head.

She gave me one last farewell,

long after her brother.

And she is dead.

Dead like the way my heart feels.

Because who else is there to watch me cry,

without thinking in their mind's eyes that I am guilty.

Guilty in the way that they might break me apart for their latest study.

Put me on display and sneer at me as they try to mold my thoughts like they're putty.

Disgusting, vile in that they might assume to know me off a few little instances,

but they know nothing.

But I'm not an empty shell.

I just know right now,

I'm mentally aware of my hell.

Of the hell I walked out of.

Of the hell that I'm still crawling up from.

Because the screams have scratched raw out of me.

And I think all manner of voices I might bellow out are long since dragged from my throat.

So here,

here I lay, wondering if I can beat this maddening decay.

I'm not going down.

Not here. Anyway.

They'll have to catch me asunder another time.

Snipe a little higher. I suppose.

Either way, I'm not fucking dying,

and nothing they're doing is going to make me go into death's throes.

Fuck them for even trying.

I'm drying my eyes now.

For the war drum is just beginning to beat,

and my eyes are filled with fire now.

I'm not their whipping boy anymore.

I'm crafting a whip from hard flame.

Forged in the fire and flesh.

I'm coming back to play them by their game.

She walks on thorns

bloody and wanting

she walks on them to feel something,

anything.

When did the night become the day all the way through?

How do you protect a heart already too open to the world?

She picks flowers from her feet

where the thorns laid bare her skin.

even in the most dismal of pains,

there,

beauty lies.