Roses and Honey

by Ren Marie Rodriguez

​

Tread gently the path of roses and honey—

what freedom do I have to offer you?

I hold on, I’m called on, but I’m too heavy

 

Lift with your back, no one will notice,

no one can see your sad and bad things

when you’re speeding down the highway

Leave them all behind, leave them far behind

and let me come home, wherever that is

 

The night we met, death was closing

Illness overwhelmed rotting muscle and tissue

I told you, don’t let me down slowly—

if you don’t know me, you can let me go sober

into the wild overgrowth

 

But I scribbled your name on the back of an envelope,

translated the word deliberately—can I be close

to you? Do you not make it sweeter, that which is

mortified? I don’t know how to stand,

but I fall beautifully

 

Stay with me.

           

Am I not here?

 

Stay with me, in my sleep, in all my fallible

days. Walls sound strange, they mess with me

in my resistance to suffering, in my lukewarm

salute to neurodiversity. I need to see for all

the miles, but the horizon is erratic

 

When everything is fair, lavender

grows in the cracks of my cerebrum, not only

deepened by something so astonishingly out

of place, but nurtured

 

The fire burns low and roses fall out of the

cactus fiber. Don’t avert your eyes—they fall soft,

I lean in soft, we walk soft into the

suffering. Now I can read what is beyond—she

wrapped her veil around my pillowy dissertation,

my patchwork frame

 

(my denial bathed three generations)

 

Allow this dewy benediction—prepare the lambs

to bare the cross upon the

path of roses and honey

 

Now go home.