Airavata

Is it pride that keeps me?
A slave to this insistence
Beyond “I am right” and “you are wrong”
Or another way around
Beyond the cast of a shadow
Dwelling in a land of silence
Where you won’t speak and nor will I
Across an expanse you sit and what?
Mourn?
Seethe?
Or do you not think of it at all?

Ever our difference I can suppose
You easily cast aside in favor of another
A thing
A toy
A friend

But I sit and wonder
I hold not to anger
For I can let it go
I can forgive
It is just not in me, this “capacity to forget”


I am like the looming grey
With tusks of white
And resonating footsteps
I search for the graveyard of my kin
Valleys hidden behind waterfalls
Stretching horizons with sand-blasted corpses
Ribcages will swallow you whole
My footprints are puddles that others can swim

I would be buried by my kind
The gentle hand dragging soft leaves and grasses
If I were anything but alone
Left to rot

I continue the best I can
The solemn slog
Through mud to swallow me
Through horrors that consume me

My mind spirals out before me
Creating places I will never go

The hot sun sets behind me
Illuminating all that I have passed up

Blindness in this one track mind
My shoulders hunker
My footsteps fall
And I carry on this migration

I breathe sweet spicy air
Rich with coarse vegetation

On my skin I feel a sun that can exist in no real place
The leather of my hide ripples across the fiber of my flesh
The ground echoes from my steps and shakes into my bones

The world stretches empty around me
Vacant fields of gold
Free of smoky scars
For a time

It is a blue like I have never known before
Clearer than the water
In the night
It echoes black
The vacuum of space spilling through the atmosphere

There is freedom in this form
And the ability not to cry
Curl everything inside
Layer upon layer
Too thick to ever find the truth
Every pain adding to what I have become

A thing that will never forget
Except that which I am supposed to feel

I trek to the graveyard
I seek my own kind

In a world of predators who can not harm me
I am alone and forgotten

I leave a river behind me
Salt
The cotton candy taste of tears

Once I had ones like me
But my mistake lay in what I thought I was
And soon
The rest wandered away

I am weary in this form
I seek the echo of dirt packed around me
I seek to see my skin blister and peel as time brings decay

A nuzzle or the muzzle
Is all my future holds
And I fear my ability to know which one

I have not forgotten what you have done to me
I remember what you said
I know how little it was
How oblivious

I can forgive
I have done so before
My list is longer than yours
Because you never knew me

We have shared a time
It has been what it has been
Hollow
Shallow
By your intention and my permission

I regret that you have allowed it to pass into history
A dusty volume on the forgotten shelf of my mind
I do not expect your concern for this matter
I know you well
I listened where you did not
I watched when you
Like a crocodile
Had your mouth open and your eyes closed

But you are a predator
And I am too forgiving

To each our separate ways
To each a long life
Health
Wealth
And wisdom if you will have it

I seek the graveyard
And you will stay in the river

A legend to she who remains
A legend to she who walks away