Untitled or a Traveler's Poem

It’s been a long time since I have been so open, so vulnerable. Since a long time, vulnerable is something that I want to be.

To shed a tear,

the thought of relaxing into someone’s arms, I find it comforting, even when it’s harrowing to bathe in this lonesome around me.

Alone, but not lonely.

Alive, but not feeling. I’m always lost, but never scared.

That’s one of the things that I’ve come to love about travel in new places.

I get lost... on purpose. I look forward

To the next movement

The next moment

I am on the edge of lost

With a goofy grin I bear each cut from the branches that scrape across my shins and arms

With prodigious joy and purpose, in search of a hard-to-find nudist beach or an untold summit.

I go days without hearing any other voice other than the one in my head.

I wonder if those cuts, that rush, is the same rush that she… feels

when the blade makes its way across her taunt thighs, hauntingly wretched and seemingly noble, The blood red

spilling over into browns so thick

your eyes won’t believe that blood is 92 percent water, an ancient paint of agrocultures past…

…I love my pain.

It no longer feels destructive. I feel… Alive, and the pain it’s always in the pursuit of something better

I promised myself that it would be

I preserve instead of desert…

This body, these feelings, these people, this mind for a lifetime

Of being

An adrenaline junkie. For the first time,

every shot up the veins into the brain

feels fated,

moving me closer into an inversion of myself that I can’t, won’t look away from.

I’m handsome like Hansel, I’m gritty like Gretel.

The longer I walk this trail, the fewer bread crumbs I have to rely on, the less I HAVE TO rely on.

Moonlight illuminates

Precious crumbs, While I

softly snooze in and out,

DREAMS on the banks of some Mekong River. I dream of the irrefusable smiles of cheeky cowboys, their pearls of words and on-and-off-again wisdom, their whiskey moonshine.

I…

LOVE me,

on most days, and I gush it.

I listen to some positive rhymes,

I dance and do like how no one else but me can, at every opportunity that feels right...

...and I relax

into it,

into the arms of what feels good…

...For the longest time now

For the shortest wile