Ask Me To dance

You ask me to dinner
I say I have plans I don’t,
invite me to a gathering
I say I won’t know anyone and decline,
ask me to dance
I say I’m already dancing
with myself.

This is my cave
this smothering darkness fear’s poisonous spider spins,
this web I weave
rejecting you who loved me
for judging
and you who tried to know me
for knowing.

Seeing this for the abnegation it is,
I watch you watch me
distancing you
before you can me,
turning my back on intimacy before it can be withdrawn,
disowning the companionship that is the fabric of my life.

Knock at my door
I pretend I don’t hear you.
Where would I be if you penetrated
the aching comfort of my asphyxiating malignancy?

But stay,
bear witness:
I am the spider and the fly
the web
the cave.

Self-perpetuating insect-instrument of destruction,
Nefarious Isolation taught me to choose
those who chose the same predatory stalking of the heart,
inhabited the same darkness,
spun the same toxic thread,
each of us enrobed in it
and waiting to be devoured by the other.

Static and stuck,
paralyzed by the venom,
I have lived so closely with death it feels like life,
but living still
have outlived the suffocating isolation
I courted for so long.

The cave is crowded with corpses of exhausted lives
enervated phantoms who can not break free
but weave a chrysalis for rebirth.

Though I struggle to find my way through the putrefying past
it is time to step into the present.

Knock again,
I am ready.

Ask me to dance.