Day 10: Rooting Reflex

Day 10 of my 30 days of poetry...I'm 1/3 of the way there.

It's been a really, really hard two days.  I don't have words to put around it, and I don't want to...and I don't really feel like I have words to name it, either (and honestly, I don't really want to)...but here's day 10.

Rooting Reflex

It draws me under and holds me.

Siphons air from my lungs like

a straw in a Ziploc bag,

it ties weights to my legs

immobilizes my body

breaks me like glass

I shatter

into thousands of pieces.

I break over my own body
like Niagara Falls

like riptide

like earthquake opening below my feet

I fall in

to old habits like I lived there yesterday;

like an infant when you brush her cheek

my rooting reflex for love and approval

has never gone away-

it leaves me gasping

like searching for oxygen on the moon,

like if I only breathe in enough of what I'm offered

my lungs will expand

like if I only try hard enough

I can live

on what is given to me.

This is the only thing

that makes me forget to notice the shape of the moon.

The way she is tethered to my outstretched hands with beams of light

even on my hardest days

I have held on to moon shine

like it is the reins of my god's horses

but this:

it rips the reins from my fingers,
leaves me like a child with no security blanket

like a boat with no lighthouse

like a car with no steering:

I don't believe in god

until the moments I feel most forsaken--

when she rolls up the ladder of her moonbeams

and leaves me to navigate the Darkness

alone.