Committed

I make the cool concessions;

Perched on the pretty little branch, I am sweetened by the sun,

I am blissful, lazy, downright crazy –

This is the time for work to be done.

I give you up, I hunker down;

I risk tripping over my syllables, letting consonants fall out of place,

I risk leaving out the last period of the final sentence of this final paragraph…

Leaving you in a bolstered sense of self-grandeur.

You’ve created this, simply by reading it.

I make the tongue lashings happen;

I am firebrand and pit-ready,

Spitting flames.

I dog at your heels like the last moment of empathy,

When you received that final check, that final kiss, that final reassuring word –

I was there to drown you in your misery.

But bliss is agony at some point,

Too much hem-hawing to get to the edge,

Too much rhetoric-passing, kite-flying, lambasting;

Here we are, we could make a difference –

If we could just give up that pretty little branch.

I am the rock amidst the waves;

Battered, rubbed out, fodder for the chopping block and the explosion all at once,

I am resting, waiting, watching,

Never without the conversation of the water lapping at my shore.