Hold Your Own

When time pulls lives apart
 Hold your own
 When everything is fluid and when
 nothing can be known with any certainty
 Hold your own
 Hold it till you feel it there
 As dark and dense and wet as earth
 As vast and bright and sweet as air
 When all there is
 Is knowing that you feel what you are feeling
 Hold your own
 Ask your hands to know the things they hold
 I know
 The days are reeling past in squealing blasts
 Stop for breath and know it's yours
 Swaying like an open door when storms are coming
 Hold
 Time is an onslaught
 Love is a mission
 We work for vocation until
 In remission
 We wish we'd had patience and given more time to our children
 You must feel each decision you make
 You must hold it
 Hold your own
 Hold your lovers
 Hold their hands
 Hold their breasts in your hands like your hands were their bras
 Hold their cheeks in your palms like a prayer
 Hold them all night and feel them hold back
 Don't hold back
 Hold your own
 Every pain
 Every grievance
 Every single stab of shame
 Every day spent with a demon in your brain giving chase
 Hold it
 Know the wolves that hunt you
 In time, they will be the dogs that bring your slippers
 Love them right and you will feel them kiss you when they come to bite
 Their hot snouts digging out your cuddles with their bloody muzzles
 Hold
 Look, nothing you can buy will ever make you more whole
 This whole fucking thing thrives on you feeling incomplete
 It is why you will search for happiness in
 whatever stupid thing you crave in a moment
 And it is why you will never find it there
 It is why you will sit there with the lover that you fought for
 In the car you sweated years to buy
 Wearing the ring you dreamed of all your life
 And some part of you will still be
 unsure that this is what you really want
 Stop craving
 Hold your own
 But if you are satisfied with what you have and who you are
 You won't need to buy new make-up or new outfits or new pots and pans
 To cook new exciting recipes
 For new exciting friends
 To make yourself feel like the new
 exciting person you think you're supposed to be
 Happiness, the brand, is not happiness
 You are smarter than they think you are
 They take us all for idiots
 That's their problem
 If we behave like idiots
 It's our problem
 So hold your own
 Breathe deep on a freezing beach
 Taste the salt of shellfish
 Smile at a stranger and mean it
 Lose your shit to your new favourite English rapper
 Hold your own
 And let it be
 Catching