Anytime my coffee gets cold
I can't help but think of you
It scalds my mouth as I drink it too fast
But the pain doesn't compare
To that I feel missing you

If feelings can be held, then I dare you to hold mine.
I dare you to catch it with your bare hands.
I dare you to hold it tight.
I dare you to put it in your pocket.
I dare you to wear it on your sleeve.

If feelings can be heard, then I dare you to hear mine.
I dare you to catch its every whisper.
I dare you to hear its screams, its laughter, its sighs.
I dare you to hear its cries.
I dare you to hear it echo through your ears.
I dare you to listen to its pleading.

If feelings can be seen, then I dare you to see mine.
I dare you to look it in the eyes.
I dare you to stare at its wholeness.
I dare you to witness its unfolding.
I dare you to marvel at its being.
I dare you not to blink as it looks at you back.
I dare you to let it see beneath your soul.
I dare you to see its light.

And if these feelings can be felt, I dare you to feel mine.
I dare you to snuggle its warmth.
I dare you to shiver at its coldness.
I dare you to feel its corners, its edges, its curves.
I dare you to feel its beating.
I dare you to feel its breathing.
I dare you to feel it.
I dare you to feel its feelings.

I dare you to feel it.
I dare you to feel.
I dare you.

"You can afford to be a romantic because you're self-sufficient." I wish that had been told to me years ago, before I turned in on myself. Slowly I'm coming back, having reduced myself almost to nothing. Hollowed out and worn, looking straight through people when they talk to me.
I don't have a narrative for what brought me here. Just images, silent pictures, exaggerated expressions. I was somewhere else, and now I'm here, with no bridge between. I was someone else, and now I'm this other person and I don't recognize either of them. Living a life that has no anchor to it, nothing to wrap my soul around.
I bought new tennis shoes today, laced them up and ran. I haven't done that in years, but my body remembered, fell back in to the smooth rhythm that used to eat up miles almost effortlessly. Only a couple for me today, and my cartilage bereft knees hating me, but it was worth it.
Friday I walked through a forest in the rain again. Smelled it, tasted it, was moved by it. An old friend not spoken with for many years. An old magic I thought I had lost forever.
I am being brought back to life by something I don't understand, like I'm being willed into an existence by some force I don't have a name for. My hands itch. And I know this feeling, this wanting. A desire to create things, to plant trees, raise up fountains, give joy. As if by some transient alchemical process I could refute cruelty, transmute pain into happiness, heal broken hearts. I know I can do none of these things though, have tried before and failed, many times. Maybe whoever it is that brought me here can.

It’s so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I’ve done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers’ breath.
But instead of resting, I’d smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I’m not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything’s fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I’m driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I’ve got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I’ll be home by dawn.

1186

Too few the mornings be,
Too scant the nights.
No lodging can be had
For the delights
That come to earth to stay,
But no apartment find
And ride away.

your body;
the brush
your canvas;
the floor
your music;
your heartbeat

Those days,
in the mornings,
I stay longer in bed.

Just gazing ,at the ceiling,
Trying to , forget
Those nights.
;I'm unable to dream.

Just over thinking,
to the point,  I fail to
silence my thoughts,
and my eyelids are denying sleep.

Those times,
I feel extraneously not exisiting,
I stand still , watching everything,
fall into place, nor fall apart
unaware* that time is still going,
and I'm just s t u c k.

in; This world,
I have gone underestimated.
Told I should go in others' path.

That my faith isn't good enough,
that I am too weak, too weak,                                                     @DemaaMu
that for my own sake,
I should listen, to their commands.

But I can never go any other way than the path I am destined to go on .

So I just lay in bed;
sick of pretending, someone I am not,
sick of people changing my identity,        

And in this life, in this world in those times in those days and nights,
I have gone, **unknown.

an average human creature should such a mythical exist
in a lifetime will celebrate about 2,200,000,000 heartbeats,
billions of heartbeats per minute (I prefer moment)
but like everything so essence human there are
those very few heartbeat moments,
the ten or twenty maybe forty total in a lifetime
that you total truly remember,
recalling the cream and sauce,
swell and the hell,
of the pounding so slow so hard,
each one a volcano of
a moment until that day
you don't remember-anything

when she said yes and you're shaking and beating in a
*****-tonk rhythm cause you were heart undressed unsure
and truly afraid of a rejection that makes a heart stoppage
disallowing visions, to be exponentially happy future imagined

you're feeling your heartbeat
in your knees going weak,
when the doctor says:

congratulations healthy swell
and/or
some years later,
I'm so so truly sorry, hell

when they hand you a long handle shovel no instructions needed and that scoop of earth weighs two tons and the sound of slow reverb in your head hurts like hell and you lack the strength to move and they move you aside quiet gentle like
but inside the temple of the two headed hydra-heart,
it's the rock and roll of slo mo, the violin crying, the drumming of
heavy metal chords plucked so slowly, it's you froze screaming

a billionaire of heartbeats you are,
but only ten or twenty maybe forty total in a lifetime
you total truly remember with the perfect clarity and
forever renders into your own unique orchestral symphony,
your true net worth, the stripes you wear
upon your shoulders skin,  
the tune when you hear it and melts you into rigidity

you fall to your knees wherever you are,
that is where you will find me,
just listen for the cars horns blaring
cursing the man lying in the street, re-listening to
ten or twenty maybe forty heartbeats total in a lifetime

you alone total truly that concert set recall and
the win-loss record inherent, inhiment,
in both of them, tears and the rents, all there in the tunes,
of forty beatings you took,
somehow it feels like here is, there was,
the answers to
where is shelter for the heart,
the answers that have gone and come and gone and someone says,

I don't feel a pulse