We are animals sweating down the hill

Our pores are open, our palms scrape the ground

We have survived.

We dream awake, magnifying our nightmares into our day

Rainbows have become an experience from afar

The recognizable has shifted, under the sheets our ghosts cry   

My roots became tangling snakes grabbing at your limbs

Your fences became too high to jump over and too slim to pass through

Our walls became too heavy to move and too swollen to break

In the maze we created, used to live a tiger princess. She ruled the water and roared fire. 

We gave her the ground to walk on, knowing that the blood along the edge would lock her in our maze forever.    

Our blood doesn’t flow anymore; it ran dry on top of her mountain

The wound is exposed, bare and pumping air

We were not quick enough to forgive or to remember

We wake up in the middle of the night with sleeping wrists and crumbling ankles

The blood forgets to cycle

But our perception is bigger than our collective resemblance

We walk the empty maze blamefully

We escape the cage to find ourselves in a respiring one

The connections became memories that beg us to cut them off

The sweat drips into tiny streams, growing into rivers of floating diamonds.

We have survived.