What Conviction Means

It was a feeling I will never forget—the last time you laid your fists on me. Because it was exactly empty. I learned to like emptiness more than pride. 

Emptiness follows, it lingers. It is a sentence that leaves no further questions. A desert that croaks its last prayer for quench, frozen in the toasted sienna of the sun, a light source egalitarian to all, merciful to none. A death sentence. Bare. Free.

If I wanted a full feeling from you and got one, one of lusciousness like the evergreen redwoods winding down the curves from the 49 to 20, on the rise to Reno, it would have left me already. 

What fills itself must be emptied. What’s ripe and fertile will inevitably be scorched into desolate plains, like your arm hairs and tender cheeks scathed by the napalm skies and air raids in Vietnam—peeled and eaten away.

A sentence that grows longer, starves further. It has conviction. It makes itself more to want more. It is a stomach lining that gets scalpeled wider.

A full feeling decays. An empty feeling may one day convince itself that it was all there ever was. And that is good. And that is smart.

It doesn’t remember the scorch or the massacre. It relishes the silence. 

This is nothing. This is all an empty feeling remembers itself to be. Emptiness stays—It stays, because nothing stays.

And this is all. All I want from you.