By Arden Leigh

How to ground yourself

Feel your hands; feel their veins and aching pain 

Tap your feet to the ground and listen to the sounds 

Sounds like some acid-jazz mixed and sent 

Meant to soothe your soul which is currently 

Out of sync with the beat of your heart 

Like some bluetooth connection has gone haywire 

And they cant speak to each other anymore, the fever dreams of some long distance lovers 

W h e n 

Your blood’s contents play catalyst to your veins’ deadly encryption 

and you can’t read or sleep or do shit about shit, like your veins are just strings attached to a bundle of party balloons that tragically flew just out of your reach when you lost your grip 

“Now, this…This is just the springtime spins and twists” 

And the pain in your wrists tells tales about seasons come and past 

And how you used to just cut your hair or rearrange the furniture or break out the spaghetti straps 

But now, you’re on some different shit, silly shit, addiction, fits, false intuits  

How do you ground yourself? 

When it all spills over, cry but then laugh 

Dip your feet in and make a splash, feel funny, like a 10 month old learning cause and effect 

It’s just stress 

A chemical and a breach in your hardware, the mid-morning stares and fallin’ down the stairs 

Don’t break a sweat

And yeah you’re gonna pace your room mindlessly and drive anywhere and everywhere to try and forget, like an amputee missing their peace of mind, but that piece of mind can be surgically reattached 

Go in like you’re your own neurosurgeon and don’t question the medical school methods, just try 

Rearrange, abstain and wipe your eyes dry, fight the urge to wanna disappear and desolidify those sad rhymes

Cut off that signal feedin’ you codeine codes from the Cloud and do it with kickback  

Scream NO and subtract the “not yet”  

Yeah, buy yourself some time and a little more room on the hard-drive 

And the rest will be history 

It all melts into the same story, like our lives are some kind of alloy 

We are all guilty of practicing the skill of smelting, it’s in human nature 

It’s an ancient technique made to glean some kind of meaning from distress and upset and war 

Like it’s been done since the Old World, you’re gonna make your ores 

Whether you use your metals to forge some Seppuku sword or sour words  

Or you swallow it and let it become you, surfacing in your skin like some argyrosis of the soul 

You’ll know when it shows 

See it as a sign telling you that it’s time to go 

Time to shepherd your hopes and dreams out of the Silk Road streams and Dark Web comminisaries 

Time to do whatever it is that you do best, and if you claim it’s nothing then you are simply a practicer of all trades and dress 

W e 

Are indomitableness, drawing circuit power from the grass and the sticks 

Not just slaves to the motherboard or menial laborers to a horde 

You’re an alloy of the natural world 

Remember this, during the springtime spins & twists