Cardstock Foxholes- A Poem — Keyword: Novelist

This poem, and many more like it, can be found in the somber and thoughtful pages of this poetry collection, available worldwide.

I tore apart the story and folded it just twice

Into creatures of the woodland and the sights I’d wished I’d seen

The artful fare that never flew

No matter the heights from which they fell or how kind the gentle breeze

Because I only ever let them go in service of the lore that saw

That I don’t really know who I am anymore

And I’ve folded this final house of cards.

What use is a pair of aces when you have no place to call your own

Or somewhere you might be going

Those lies that say you’ll go

Out onto the deck of a crumbling world

Into the sunshine and the curl

Of a cloud that has yet to fully form

One that hasn’t shadowed

Hasn’t wallowed

Hasn’t mourned

The death of who I might have been

When I was my own childhood dream

I know even now it still should’ve mattered

Perhaps I might still see

The writer that I never was and the man I couldn’t be.

Too lost in lives that were not there

Or shared with those that I wish were

Not found in deepest shallows where I could never swim

But in hollow halls where thought lightbulbs would only ever dim

Always to the tune of an infinite song

That placed each note just right

I was never the pen on an unwritten page

I was always the unwilling darkness in the light

The shadow

That specter

The dealer shuffling those false cards

I was nothing in this hollow house

I seem to be the dying heart of every star.

The funniest thing of funnier things is that I wish it wasn’t so

No matter the places I’ll say that I’ve gone

There are thousands more to which I cannot go

Into the hearts of my untrue friends

And the memories that they’ve made

There’s not even life in the lives I have lived

There’s just the loved ones who just wouldn’t stay

In the world that I so wish we’d shared

This hollow fragile box

And now there’s a fox and he’s loose in the henhouse

Even though it’s empty and it’s bare

And I wish I could say that I’ve gathered today

The eggs and the feathers and wings

But I sit and I wait for the nothing that comes

In the dark where no angels can sing

Because the walls are cut thin with hearts and their spades

And that fox will die alone all the same

In the empty still box now a starving once-was

Who finally knows you can’t live eating paper cranes.