Leaving them never gets easier
Friends and family, teachers and babysat kids.
When you live apart from them
You live in two different worlds

Constantly:
The world
                                  where you are
and
                                                      The world
where your heart is

When you love people and things in both worlds
Remember you'll visit the other
Forget that their lives will have changed
You have to keep your mind here                for now.

I've wanted to write something for days now.
But what?
What's worth putting to pen?
What matters to me now and here?
What matters at all?

A paper that will never be published.
A song that will disappear into the abyss of music memory.
A website for a startup that could never take off?
Countless countless research papers to read for a research project that I'm not supposed to work on yet.

How should I be spending my free time?
Is there something inherently wrong in asking that?
But really, I need to know. Is it correct that I'm spending my vacation finishing projects?

Perform a song. Move on to practice a different song. What song? Except I need to practice something an hour a day.
Meet a friend for coffee. We go to a museum we've both been to too many times . Why are we here? Except that we want to be together.

What does it mean to want to spend the day with someone but have no idea what to do?
What does it mean to have so many long meaningful conversations that you can't remember the subject of?

Is it the people that matter?
The common agreement to keep a bond?

Is it the exploration of creativity that matters?
The continuous honing of skills into activities I enjoy and take pride in?

Am I perfecting my projects? Am I perfecting myself? Is that what is correct to do on vacation?

Perhaps this poem was just another item to check off an arbitrary to-do list.

There are warnings
You are always warned
Don't eat the candy
Stay in at night
Lock the door.
There are always warnings
Always warning you
But for the second
You are tempted
You remember vaguely
The constant background warning
But you were never given
The stories behind them.
You are tempted
You forget
You fall, and end changed.
Now you are a story.
Now you warn.
There are always warnings.

I put my hair up today
Standing with grocery bags tucked under my arms,
Pearl earrings nestled just so out of the whisps of hair,
I stared hard at the mirror
I looked like...
Like an adult.
Prepared, studied, not so pale and flitterfly
I took down my hair
And then fastened the pin again.
I closed the mirror I realized I longer looked in for hours.
It was time to buy groceries.

Amidst the smoke and light and laughter
Along the smiles and cheers thereafter

A sound is bled, wrung free from strings
It bounds and treads and wholly sings
Inside each song, a secret’s moved
Not right nor wrong or frequent proved
The message dances from bow to ear;
A coded trance of love and fear
From left to right the story rings
Of death and light the Cello brings
The covert tale engulfs the room
It vibrates truth to those who loom
The Cello knows for why it’s played
Its secret lost, both gone and stayed

In the smoke and light and laughter
Music lies and cries thereafter

I am day
And you are night?
If we lived in a life of dusk,
Then, perhaps we could stay together.

Don't give me all your kissing treaties
Don't pry my heart open.
Maybe I was better off
Sipping waters from my dreams.
Now ****** shores are all explored
Looted, torn and left to burn.

This land left an isolate isle again.

For a time I thought my soil had healed.
Then I saw rain for seven days.
My eyes are leaking again
And the ground proves still unsteady.
Floods return in an instant
At a whisper of Celtic ballads in the wind.

I have layers, sediments.
The undergrounds bump unevenly, uncomfortably
Uncovered in areas of sunken swamps and ponds
Sometimes discovered, but mostly revealed
To strangers who are not kin
To kin who should not find them.

Do I dare be found again?
Do I want to be conquered?
Laid claim to, or too much my own?
Shall I remain alone?
Perhaps, it would be better
To sink quietly beneath these waters.

                                                        ­                 Goodnight.