Say anything but the words in your head.
Smile when he does.
Don’t take the flash in his eyes too personally,
(everything he finds beautiful warrants the cosmos from their depth)
Blush and be flattered.
Watch his lips, but don’t read them.
(The literature you find there will always be the stuff of fantasy)
He’ll laugh, low and warm,
and under it, you will flicker like candlelight,
but a wick only lasts so long.
If you fall,
you’ll fall from great heights.
His nimble fingers won’t make that
kind of catch.
Apr 11, 2015
Apr 11, 2015 at 3:10 PM UTC
When is it over?
When your name isn’t synonymous with “beautiful”,
wanting to say “…the rise and fall of my heart when I hear , see, taste, touch, smell"
encompassing the "you",
what you do too.
Sprained look, your eyes...
Bound & sliced by silence.
and this will...fade.
The salted end,
It’s presence
hovers. Burning..
wills itself bittersweet.
Apr 11, 2015
Apr 11, 2015 at 2:46 PM UTC
I know the strength of my own voice,
It cracks frequently, words have weight,
and are weapons if thrown at the right angle,
so I stay left.
Anything I’ve ever tried to let go of has claw marks.
Anything I hold grows roots around my bones,
keeping me together since I learned to live split.
Come here,
I want to kiss all your scratches.
I know getting this far
was a tightrope walk over a chasm.
That you break apart
and ignore your whole image
but I look at you,
and see all the ways a soul can illuminate,
yours lights lanterns in all my dark places,
You burn.
I know
there will always be more questions
than answers in my mouth,
but if you are sure of nothing else,
whether it is days you
out blaze the sun
or nights you shatter yourself
into pieces for later collection,
I will love you when gathered and still.
I will love you when you are a storm.
I don’t know any other way.
Sep 19, 2014
Sep 19, 2014 at 12:35 PM UTC
I once read, and I’m paraphrasing,
that "there are two kinds of lovers…those you write poems for,
and those you don’t"
I have built every word on your kind of compassion,
inked of this heart in my hands.
I know I’m careless with it sometimes,
take for granted it’s resilience.
Often dropping, then coming to cradle it's pulse may be
my only notion of grace,
that you believe in my clumsy grasp.
I know,
loving me is not easy.
Even now, I run in circles around and from your patience,
trying to find or keep or cleanse the 'me' in 'us',
but the distance to home is always wherever I stand
to your arms.
By nature, I’m homesick often.
Your love is a house I want to grow old in.
I promise to take my coat off.
Just leave the heat on high.
Sep 19, 2014
Sep 19, 2014 at 12:26 PM UTC
He loved her, of course.
But more important than that,
better than that,
He chose her.
Day after day.
Love is easy.
Choice: that was the thing.
And, one of the hardest things you can learn,
is to leave what wants to be left,
when it is not your choice to go.
Love.
The feeling is what you own, not the person you've attached it to
Sep 3, 2014
Sep 3, 2014 at 2:24 PM UTC
How the heart can beat so, so strong but never in a straight line.
That a promise is not a contract but breaking either has consequence.
That ‘consequence‘ sounds negative and rarely is.
How time heals…and that healing itself is change, you are not the same person carrying a scar with a story.
Giving up and letting go are two sides of the same coin that you clench in your fist, or carry in your pocket.
That, if there is strength in numbers, it’s never as much as a single soul with intense purpose.
To grow in a love that lifts itself and still keeps you steady,
not one that makes you want to apologize for the fall.
What it takes to understand a person that cares enough about you
to hide how little they care about you.
How to compromise with anyone but yourself
because common ground is shared,
but you are always wherever you stand.
That indifferent is the worst thing to be,
because anything real has an end point,
and nothing, can go on forever.
How to get out of your head enough to
remember you have a body.
To speak truth, despite.
That OK
is where everyone usually ends up,
even if we **** up entirely along the way.
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 4:06 PM UTC
Don’t ask me about our conversations,
How he turns my tongue into a loom that weaves innuendo,
every other word a variation of invitation.
"Hello" purrs like "come here,"
"good morning" yearns to be "night."
The constant struggle of spaces-
to find,
to fill,
to close.
Don’t ask me about his mouth,
It’s rhythm that makes a stutter of my pulse.
His lips, how they ruby and part, taut like a drum
over his crooked smile,
how I want them to make music of me.
Don’t ask about my fingers afflicted by wanderlust,
how he feels like a long, open road, the lines of him begging
exploration, to trace the places remembered…
discover what’s yet to be found.
Don’t ask me about his hands.
How they are beautiful and skilled in ignition.
About my tinder skin or the fire of his gaze…
how I burn under the lidded, blue flames.
Don’t ask me about my hunger,
the way my stomach drops when he comes to me, jaw tensed, sweet
skinned and swollen,
how it’s yet to be appeased.
How I shape my lips to say “yes,”
how it always feels like “please”
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 10:50 AM UTC
One morning, over coffee, in a well lit breakfast nook, with toast crumbs on her lips,
and sleep fading from her eyes-she’ll be abruptly brave and ask you if any of the words scribbled in the bent notebook you carry around and never share, are for her.
“Do you write about me?” The hit of the question will leave you dazed. A response well deserved will not come….and she will sigh, and stand up,walk out of the well lit room and you won’t ask her to stay.
A long distance runner in the obstacle course of your communication skills, and she is getting tired.
Tired of your withdrawn ability to only filter emotion through a pen to a page.
“I don’t know why you have lips” she said once, laughing with a hint of hurt So, you pressed your face to her throat and made her remember how speech isn’t always necessary.
What she doesn’t know… and what you can’t seem to tell her, is that she is in you so she is every word.
She is every word you write and that is nothing you can say.
Instead you leave the notebook in the rocking chair by the window, with her favorite view,
of a stream beyond a field. “It reminds me that moments can stop whole hours” she said once,
and that was a line you worked words around for years.
You rip a page and leave it folded inside “Just keep reading”
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 10:49 AM UTC
I don’t know when I stopped
trying to close the distance in your eyes.
However strong my halved limbs,
some places are too far and far gone
to run to.
Once upon a time, I named all my bridges perseverance
and built them unpermitted
in your heart stream.
You never halted construction
then let me solo dive my days away.
Deep in that blue, I never found a bottom,
and treading water is the same as running in place.
So, I grew matchsticks for finger tips
and swirled gasoline in my mouth,
spit flames with the same urgency
I once hammered points for your favor.
It took me 20 something years to learn to live in this temple,
I don’t have that kind of time to convince worship in yours.
I’m catalyst, you’re muse and too polar for harmony.
We never stood at the same time on even ground.
Here now, the sky displays forever fire
and opens behind me burning.
I have no place to go
but further away.
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 10:48 AM UTC
The last time you saw her,
there was a sureness in her gaze not present before,
an acceptance of your place,
this beginning of an end of a beginning.
You still didn’t know what to tell her,
but anything done will resonate in those calm eyes-
that she is more than the nothing you say,
but that will never be enough.
“You don’t know how beautiful you are” she says, and that, to her, is strange.
She tells you, over and over.
She wants you to believe her,
to use her as a mirror instead of a maze to get lost in.
Still, she lets you try,
mistaking freckles for breadcrumbs by moonshine,
enough light to find your way in,
then out.
You try to picture another face and wonder what they’ll look like when you find them,
beneath the rock,
hiding in the haystack,
made in the rough,
Their arms like doors and eyes like windows, waiting to be the place you live.
You know they’ll inspire your coveted words.
She,
She will be a letter at the bottom of a box in the back of your closet you will read over
only upon coming home,
to remember how much you are missed when you’re gone,
to remind you what’s left when you leave.
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 10:47 AM UTC