Alix Klingenberg offered an amazing prompt 🔥🫶🔥 here is what came out of it

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Weightless

By Bear Sage

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Fuck.....

Can I really let this version

speak, this Quasimodo

inside of me?

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Excavating years worth

of burial dirt

exposing the version

of me I quit weeping for

decades ago

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He's waist-deep in the tail of the pool

mist still hanging like breath

trout slurping the morning hatch

and his hand knows before his brain does

where to place the fly

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The take is electric and calm at once

the rod bends, the fish runs

he brings it to hand, watches it

slip back into the current

already looking upstream

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because his heart is a wandering soul

restless, always moving

pool to pool, moment to moment

chasing that split second

when the world stops burning

and he's weightless

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I can't remember the last time

I lived like that

no future tense, no mortgage coming due

no small voices calling me back

to the world that needed building

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He doesn't know yet

what I had to trade him for

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Some days I catch myself

reaching for that weightlessness

like some phantom limb

the body remembering

what it's like to move

without carrying everything

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I buried him because I had to

but damn, I miss the bastard

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The stage lights hit and his voice

fills the room without effort

people hanging on his words

about living in the moment

being present, being here

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He feels their energy shift

knows he's moving something in them

making a difference, mattering

this is what it means

to be important

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But even as they eat up every word,

even as he tells them how to stay

his mind is already upstream

chasing the next room

the next river, the next rush

of that unreachable now

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He surfaces when I write these poems

when I let myself feel

beyond this reality

and for a second I think

maybe I could let him breathe

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But I can't

I fucking can't

so I'm shoving him back down

into the hole I dug decades ago

choosing the life that buried him