Perfect purity doesn’t persist, even exist--
Not even in children.
Who have to learn to grow a soul,
Share their toys,
Not emotionally blackmail,
And understand death and that pain to others is real.

Still I feel as if my own childhood’s eyes
Wouldn’t recognize, wide and impressionable
As watercolor lilies,
The woman with eyes fogged
From overpopulation of troubles.
Green grass to jaded.

Self-doubt blooms like the flower
It would be ashamed to be.
Rushing up like a seed that feeds
In the darkness, in, perversely, the gut.
Unknown in youth, it towers,
Then plateaus, in ego.

Vines of avarice mustn’t be allowed
To grasp for the old selfishness.
Placidity can’t be tranquilly accepted
When it slips cozily into the bed to invasively smother
hard-wished-for dreams and hard-won values.

Go the hearty and fertile ground in the middle,
For there we all have our hope.

A women boarded the same subway stop as me today.
She wore a white, flowing shawl with tiny purple flowers on it
that stretched down to her knees.
She reminded me of my childhood and of my mother in her thirties.
She held a grocery bag with daffodils in it,
and I felt she was something rather special.

Perhaps we had been joined in each other's lives
for these fifteen minutes,
for some strange reason,
much unbeknownst to the two of us.
I tried to figure it out,
but ran out of time,
and as we emerged from the station,
she walked north,
and I went east.
Maybe I'll never know.
Maybe she was just a woman
with a white shawl and purple flowers.

You don’t need anyone to light you up.
Don’t ever let anyone else become
your sun, you are your own sun.
I believe that it is necessary to find
your moon, the person that you
reflect off of, and the person that you
fall into special kind of gravity with,
but no one should ever become your sun.
You are your own sun and you must
be your own source of light and life,
because once someone else
becomes your sun, and once that
sun falls into another’s orbit,
all of the flowers you’ve planted
shrivel up and die in darkness.
You must be your own sun.

You know it's funny--
our late nights when we're chasing
the dawn. I think we're waiting,
we're thinking
if we can just make it
for long enough, a big red sun
will clear squinting red eyes.
We're staying up for a revelation.
The new day will tell us
that we were wise
for chasing the light.
That it's all alright.
After all our dark nights.
Dancing our feet off for it.
Arguing with each other,
familiarity breeding contempt,
when it's 3 a.m. and we've been together
since Friday night dinner.
When a demon named Insomnia
whispers to keep our eyes open,
we do it because we don't want to lose.
In the morning, we pray,
we'll know what we should do.