Roses and Honey

Tread gently the path of roses and honey—
what freedom do I have to offer you?
I hold on, I’m called on, but I’m too heavy

Lift with your back, no one will notice,
no one can see your sad and bad things
when you’re speeding down the highway
Leave them all behind, leave them far behind
and let me come home, wherever that is

The night we met, death was closing
Illness overwhelmed rotting muscle and tissue
I told you, don’t let me down slowly—
if you don’t know me, you can let me go sober
into the wild overgrowth

But I scribbled your name on the back of an envelope,
translated the word deliberately—can I be close
to you? Do you not make it sweeter, that which is
mortified? I don’t know how to stand,
but I fall beautifully

Stay with me.

Am I not here?

Stay with me, in my sleep, in all my fallible
days. Walls sound strange, they mess with me
in my resistance to suffering, in my lukewarm
salute to neurodiversity. I need to see for all
the miles, but the horizon is erratic

When everything is fair, lavender
grows in the cracks of my cerebrum, not only
deepened by something so astonishingly out
of place, but nurtured

The fire burns low and roses fall out of the
cactus fiber. Don’t avert your eyes—they fall soft,
I lean in soft, we walk soft into the
suffering. Now I can read what is beyond—she
wrapped her veil around my pillowy dissertation,
my patchwork frame

(my denial bathed three generations)

Allow this dewy benediction—prepare the lambs
to bare the cross upon the
path of roses and honey

Now go home.