Why must you pull me back?
you evil thing tugging with a lion's brutality on the cords of my ankles.

then I cannot walk or run free.
and leap through those transparent but fierce and threatening walls of this cage.

how this cage is taught to mock the young and their delicate visions. How often it swats them down like an insignificant spit.

makes it a dirty thing, crawled over with dust and crippled by its loose wings.
this thing on my heels grows from these walls. It belts heartily at my scoured face in the very minute my eyes creak open and realize… the ceiling is still the sky I fear to see.

my vision only goes as far my eyes or my most recent step and then evaporates in the heat of this place.

so hot. like a casual hell.

my sweat is salt wrapped around my dead determination.
maybe i’ll flame up and spark and singe down into a thing that may seep beneath the cracks and i’ll find a great wind, a fantastic breath.
and my vision may find the blue of the sky and the air of the clouds and the bright, rolling, thunderous boast of the stars.

is it foolish to want so rough you may snatch the red from your own blood?

For most, it simply grows dreary and grey and drains back, slow, right back into your veins.
and you walk with oldness, the memory of a scarlet thing that might have meant an even brighter thing.

I want a brighter thing. So bright that you may see it. So bright that I might share it.
oh, but this cage is fierce to force the liquid mars into my flesh when I mean to hold my red life.
these walls yearn me to exhale an air that makes my skin beg another soul and my soul beg another skin.

I know the regret of this chest and the tight, stark knuckles of that dark thing curled around my withering feet.
but I still see. my vision is short but I am not blind. I must burn away of roll or fly or fight or saw my legs to grow anew.

anything to face away from these walls and see valleys.

I mean to see far. so others may see. so that my sight is seen.

and seen true.

it takes a strength that I've only begun to punch up from my insecure gut.
may I find a hearth to nurture this strength and birth the spirit that ran lost in my soul ages ago.
my vision must not be swat or be drowned in the spit of these walls.
it can't be made a solid thing or I may drown as well.

I must hold my spilled ruby, as it will continue to cascade in a loud color across this grungy cage floor. Hold it so that I may see wide.
Run to find those things I see new. make my vision honest.

and let this skin and this hell and these high, mocking walls team in wild fits, burned in the devastation of a vision freed.