Every time your eyes touch me
my skin flushes hot and my heart tears open
making room for the love you pour into me

Every time you gift me affection
my energy reaches through miles
holding your pain until it heals in the depth of my truth

Every time you bare more of yourself to me
you fill my essence with your light
making me strive to be better than I thought I could be

Every moment you love me more intensely than the one before
it surprises me anew
proving minutes of pure love are stronger than a lifetime of tepid affection

4X6 inches
of perfection on a screen
a hint of tortured possibilities
carried in the pocket
of a life built
through blinders and
the most beautiful denial

4X6 inches
of hope undeniable
the foundation of dreams
dragging rough
through cascading walls
of a substandard fairytale
that twisted joy unhappy

4X6 inches
of a smile through a hurricane
bleeding pain through evaporating tears
a reality forged through time uncountable
landing in the rays truth created
when love proved
the existence of fate

4X6 inches*
of peace over pain
a wand in magical medicinals
crashing through solitary anguish
with eyes piercing armor
weaved in passive aggression
leading the lost home

Falling into you I found myself
For with you I was never lost
Blinded by an unkind past
The present, tinged with shame
Became my only truth
Then... I saw you

You gazed upon me
Open and trusting
And I could no longer hide from myself
Your eyes peel me naked
And I stand bare before you
awaiting a judgment that will never come

You see what I thought I lost
What felt like it died long ago
You see who I used to be
Who I always have been
And because it's you
I believe it's true

Your smile is my hope
Your heart carries my heartbeat
Your eyes, so full of love
Prove that I am all I ever wished to be
All I was supposed to be
Before life beat the joy out of me

You found me and I knew
I knew you were mine
I knew you before I met you
I dreamed you alive so long ago,
And here in my heart, I fell in love
In your love, in loving you...

I can learn to love me

a limp body
carried in broken arms
to a funeral pyre
hidden in the woods

tinder, salt-saturated
won't catch
drowning in the perception
of failure

life flows out
and seeps in
healing in unfettered
emotion

exhaustion bleeds thought
cracks fuse invisibly strong
still feeling both less
yet more, somehow

pyre lays unlit
as the heart dreams ablaze
in lost memories
of a life not yet lived

one without the other
cannot exhale
breathing in all the nothing
looking for the only thing

not knowing what or where
but the when is now
as wood sits on the ashes
of what came before

in the jolt of drowning
on overflowed tears
it flows out of each
and into the other

cracks fade
accidental truth is never an accident
too tired to continue
it was found where it lay sleeping

patient and blind
sprouts into the best
of unseen possibilities
the day you carried me in silence