My lungs dissipate into this silence
The fires between yesterday and tomorrow
Burn in the back of my throat
I take the words I’ve collected over the years
Store them in jars with pennies and fears
I envelop my breath with rain clouds and blues
Ready to mail it out to the years

Between us are silent sorrows
We’ve only just reunited
And already, a vast sea has made its home
Between you and me
We filled it with our tears
I spoke, you listened, I listened, you spoke
Our heartbeats aligned
Momentarily we breathed
And words flowed out
Drowning us in memories
You make your departure,
Leaving me as I overthink the unspoken

The fire’s put out, but nothing’s left
If you ever return with more things to say
You can count the pennies and words I kept
But I’ll be gone into the void of yesterday
With healing lungs,
putting out the fires you left behind

when you climb mountains
you leave your footprints
in the rigid soil
that feeds into the ground
we once laid on
waiting for the sun to descend
to take our guards down
and prepare our fingers
for pointing at stars

Time leaves us reminiscing
Leaving behind bitter tastes laced with honey
something you liked about coffee
on these notes

I think about the distances between
Who you are and what I hope to be
And I see the mountains you said you'd climb

From the echoes of the future
What would you like to hear?
I hear sea breeze and glittering leaves
Rustling in a wind that has travelled from yesterday
Touched your palms and took you dancing on the moon
Then bid it's farewell to meet you once again someday

If this is all we've left behind
Of fractured conversations broken up by laughs and cries
I hope that somewhere under this broken starlight
You find the strength to dream and feel
And when you sleep, all your prayers reverberate through the atmosphere

We shall meet someday, in a moment of realization
Or in someone's loving daze
We shall watch the sunset and wave our last goodbyes

From: the past
To: the future

It's just you here
With this open wind

And a thought that craves to be embraced
By the arms of a voice daring enough
To bring it out into the open

It's just you here
With a beating heart harmonizing with the sea

Among waves of silenced love
and whispers of forgotten dreams
That colour this terracotta sand

It's just you here
Under the broken sky

A crying heart calls out to you
Looking for consolation
So, you put your hand on your chest.

Reminding it,
It's just you here

And you are alive

I miss the sweetness of writing
When words would untangle these corroded arteries
And bring relief to the pain left behind
By the dying starlight

I dust off recollections of our past
Dressed in all black
Stretching my limbs into a new atmosphere
Remembrance is pinned onto my beating heart

If I ask you to hold my hand
And walk me through this dark tunnel
Would you become the flicker of light
That I dream of at night?

There is a canvas made of broken sky
Covered in dust left behind by the sunset
Pigments swirl in these hopeful hands
I crave to paint, write, and leave behind colorful impressions

But these words have inhabited
The rivers of blood within me
And they flow from thought
To dream
To lungs
To sky,
sea,
and breeze
Then
All the way
Back to me

Let's liberate this silence
Let it blemish with the smoke
Coming off of the cooling coal
That once burned
in the wake of unvoiced promises

Somehow, you and I have managed to exchange dreams,
fears, and beliefs with one simple unspoken conversation

And now words cascade
Down rivers of my arteries and veins
Toward the palm of your hands
Hold them close
(I never intended to let them go)

But it seems that with every nonverbal exchange
A string of understanding ties us together
And there is nothing left in my power that I could do

To save us from the falling sky, splinters of moon,
and blankets of midnight blue

To the distances I could not go for you
I will say a thing or two
Maybe you will find in the vast field of canola
The same sun kissed reasons
For leaving behind the love of all seasons
To tremble in the wake of one

To the white noise we befriended
You hand-in-hand with silence
Wear the stars like midnight bloom
The sun avoids our encounters
And we become the founders
Of bordered misunderstandings

Blooming flowers, spring's demise,
Winter creeps inside your eyes
I would have left everything behind
If it weren't for this unsettled mind
But these vast fields of distances grow
Through the skies and soil above and below

And I, drowning in dreams of tomorrow,
Have lost the map I was meant to follow

Tell those distances I have yet to know
That I'm still learning how to let go