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