I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

But somehow,I’ve stopped praising you. How the valleywhen you first see it—the small roads backto your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,then, after a month of black coffee, it’s justanother place your bullish brain exists, botheredby itself and how hurtful human life can be.Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some daysfull of crow and shine, and then someonehas put engine coolant in the medicineon another continent and not even cryinghelps cure the idea of purposeful poison.

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes-- part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don't.

I'll be the strike anywhere, the reckless match you can count on to claim a life, or to save one.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief.If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival break down, make the factory fail,to know that this war was winless,to know that she would singlehandedlydestroy us all.

I haven't given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even

I'm afraid that I won't do the right thing in the face of disaster. Or, I'm afraid I will be stupidly brave.