Who is really kept safe in a nature refuge? Wild animals or the humans that visit?

The animals don’t recognize the boundaries. Humans create them.

The animals benefit from the physical protections. But it seems they don’t look behind, or too far ahead wondering if they are promised tomorrow.

I think the humans need the refuge much more to remind us that-Lifelines run through trees, And birds fly with ease.

Sidewalk chalk, All that’s left, All that’s lost.

Hot balmy nights of summer, Flags flying, Even the breeze doesn’t offer relief.

Mass confusion, Leadership colluding, Pressing our backs against a wall we will tear down.

Born from Enlightenment, We are the Self-Governed.

But old man’s pride and a sly orange smile are stomping too close to my fangs.

Even the thought they might care–The occasional, “how are you?’ feels like the sweetest sun rays piercing through dissipating, thunder clouds.

Their shortest of words acting with the deepest sentiments of love, making it possible to talk to them out loud and inside your head when all the other moments feel too heavy.

But the second you hear the laughter in their voice change to a stranger’s tone, a new bolt of lightening strikes the water, splitting the ship in two, tossing you out to sea–

And there is no mercy when the fifty foot swells suck you down with relentless force into their deep, dark abyss of a lost planet.

That break in time,

That splitting of what feels like your soul, as the vision of light you remember in their eyes turns to rejection from within–biology revolts.

Your lungs fill with the dark, murky salt water.

Stinging.

Strangling.

Suffocating.

Alarms going off, loud, angry, red, flashing lights–fangs bared screaming EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY–you need to breath.

But FUCK! What direction do you swim to take what you need?

Panic setting in–throwing off all sense of space…

Will you make it through the storm this time?

I wrote you that first message.

I invited you to coffee, just coffee.

I showed up to get you when you got stuck in the mountains.

I brought you homemade muffins when I thought I got you sick.

I invited you to your “would be” second concert before you flew to Romania, but you didn’t show up.

I was there to talk to you everyday when you were in Romania, until one day you disappeared and didn’t talk to me for the next 6 months.

I sent you care packages on your birth day and Christmas two years in a row.

I ordered your photographs that hang on my walls because I believe in the artist that I see.

When I thought you may have cared, I flew to where you were for a whole week because you told me it would be okay to drive out and see the stars together.

But when you saw me, you shut the door in my face and you said,  “You can’t be here. You need to leave.”

How is cruelty so easy for you? And how could I have allowed it? 

And who is the monster that I see? It’s me. It was only ever me.

This winter I will share my Coyote Story. But tonight, under the great stars of the desert, I will sleep for the first time in 23 full moons, one year, nine months, and sixty-five days.