You can drink.

The part of me I landed on since even before Maryland I have pretended not to see but it's sitting here finally staring back at me.  This happens some days your one-eyed blindness comes a-reckoning.

There is fine gray rain-light in my back room at Ocean Pines.  The quiet truth is you can't go back again.  If you know me you know words flex in and out and taunt and haunt my head, you know fire propels and burns my guts and runs my legs and doesn't let me settle, you know the arrows of these things draw electric on my skin and you know the deep quiet places I like to disappear from it all into mellow trance and stare.  You also know there's a shine that transmutes everything and illumines the muscle of my heart and leads me and that most of all for this heartlight I will and do forsake all.

My father leaves for golf after coming back for a rain jacket.  It is near 60 out today.  My mother is on a plane to Mexico. Miles from here my cousins are in cozy nests each with their loves and this of course is the only thing that makes sense.  I try not to be jealous or misunderstand.  The first beach boy I ever loved has wrung me up and washed me out which is exactly what I came here to let him do.  All of it is past now Kel, can you be past it, too? HOME.  Where I stand it sits out like a soft grassy tump just above some fast moving blue waters.  They are crystal clear.  To write this makes me also see the Ocean City pier.  There is above it a sky that is soft and pink-yellow with the warmth of a season-worn sun.  The waters are tracking and quicker than they've been in a long time and yes, that's it.  I don't have to cross them, and that is what it is to stand here.  Because you can go back you can go back over and over and again to the many dark falls just behind you oh but to stand here, on the grassy tump with forested woods thick and deep just steps away from my feet--and so many cliff sides on the shore to the other side.  You also don't have to.  You also can just sit shoreside, and breathe.  You also can scoop handful.  You can drink girl, you can drink.  My god this thing will move you, you can let it, can stop the canvassing and cutting of jungle vines can stop all the bloody poison you keep ingesting in your veins.  You don't have to cross these waters again because there's no place else left to go. You can jump in, right here, and let the waters wash you through.

Or you can just stand, too.  Stand in this peace awhile, on this sturdy ground.  Appreciating the scenery.  The where you've been.