When Your Feed Becomes a Graveyard

My therapist told me
You're either alive or you're not
There is no in between.
So here I am, alive for now.
Writer, for now.

My words never leave.
They are in me
like life and love and messy truth.
It appears I am a writer
until I am dead.
My words always in me with every breath
waiting for me to find them
know how to call them
nurture them
and invite them to stay.
I write as a form of self love
self preservation
and acceptance.
I write for everyone who can't-
not as their voice but as a witness
to this continuation of being.
I write for everyone who is no longer here-
dead, I mean.
Their bodies no longer envisioning futures
but a different kind of creator.
Change maybe.
Or mothering.
Or bring something new and good here.
Because my therapist got it almost right.
We are alive until we are not
but when we are not we do not cease to create.
Our life stretches past
into whatever comes next after we die.

So the boy who played violin for shelter cats, Elijah McClain, demands response and asks for change. Breonna Taylor has her name written in law. Nina Pop and Tony McDade refuse to go unanswered and Amhaud Arberry continues running towards freedom for us all. And when Mamie Till decided open casket Emmett asked a people to move out of bondage. The list goes on
makeshift cemeteries on corner blocks
unmarked mass burials
scorched earth
haunted trees
and closed cold cases.
History remembers even if we do not record.

So my therapist was right and wrong.
We are alive until we are not. But even when we are not *this*
we are still here in the birth of movement.
In the tears of love
and rage of pain.
So when your feed becomes a graveyard
pay attention.
Movement
rebirth
burning
and burial is happening.
Do not miss the flood.
Peace and peace be to you on this side of being. And peace and peace to those on the other.

We have one wild life
and I intend to spend mine in observation
fluidity
movement
writing
self returning
submerging
continuation of the path never completed
by those who came before me.