From your Father,
When I grew up I lived in a small brick house that was cold in the morning no matter how many times your grandfather yelled at the fireplace, the world never let him dream, he had to earn it.
You will never meet him.
You will never be the small reminders and the soft tug on the bottom of my sternum helping me sleep at night, I will give you string and yarn asking you to weave silk and save me from the winter.
Your hands will be overflowing with apologies, the sink will always be filled with water that looks like it is pulsing at an open wound, and the gauze from your mother's gentle throat is never going to stop you from leaking out how sorry you are.
I was not raised to be what you need.
I am not going to love you the right way.
When you are 7 I am going to tell you that the way you carry yourself isn't tall enough, for your 9th birthday I will give you a mustard seed and a pocketknife and will ask you to grow cherry blossom trees throughout our back yard and in all the pastures of the city, and cut each of them down the very next day, and THEN I will tell you how to be a man.
When you are 17 you are going to cry so hard that God mistakes your mouth for the trumpets that were used to tear down Jericho and when your walls come apart I am going to color your heart with footsteps leaving the room.
I will show you how to miss a warm shower, how to pretend so hard your head cracks and your skull looks
like the coldest bowl of tomato soup I ever gave you.
You will not see that this whole time I have been staining your windows to see things in a better light, even if it is not clearer in the afternoon.
This is my blessing.
From your Mother,
I was raised with ***** hands and the only person who I ever looked at in the morning and loved back was the sun.
Your grandfather taught me how to ride a horse, and cover up a bruise, how to scrub blood stains out of my white blouses, and a whiter conscious, and how to grieve.
Oh how he taught me to grieve.
You will never meet him.
When you are 10, I am going to write down all the sins of your father on a piece of paper, slit your throat with it, and tell you that it's just a papercut, I will show you that faith does not move mountains, it simply makes them smaller.
You will stand up, shake the dust off your knees, and learn to clench your fists without worrying who will hear you.
I will try, but I will not love you correctly.
When you are 13 I am going to show you that what you see is not always on your side, you can love someone harder than you can stab them, but people are going to worry about ****** knuckles before they take a second look at a bruised heart, they're going to forget which one is more important.
I am going to tell you to forgive them, and I will never truly mean it.
Maybe I am sorry.
I am going to flirt with death until it blushes so hard that the blood from it's cheeks flows down to it's chest and gives it a heartbeat.
I am going to make you understand that GOD needs you just as much as you need Him, and there is power in prayer, in the way God might not be worth as much when people aren't giving Him their attention.
I am going to help you need less of the world, but a little more from people.
Your words will be full and deep, but never your pockets.
This is my blessing.

Nothing is as simple as it ever seems, and nothing ever will be.
You can say "I love you." or "you make me happy" without uttering a single word, and I think that's
the only reason anyone can make it past the age of twenty-five.
I remember being in third grade wishing I was made of steel and concrete and every other single thing that my father's knuckles couldn't break through.
I remember being young and putting conch shells to my ear because then you would hear the ocean, and I remember doing the same to my grandfather's grave, and how his marble tomb sounded like a hollow room with smoke rising upwards through the floorboards, and I see how even at our composition, we are flooded with what we cannot turn away from.
I see the power of finding more in things that you don't really understand, and that even something as soft as a voice can be my sweet tooth.  
I was once told that people are exactly what they allow themselves to be, and are defined by the things that they were given, yet decide to change.
So just know that I feel the time passing like wind sliding down my back, and I am carving softer ways to love you,
I am trying less to know you and more to know why.

Because the way tires leave blisters on the skin of the road when they leave too quickly, is the same way goodbyes scrape arms.
It is easy to devalue our breath, when we live in a world filled with flame, and coal, and ice which are not supposed to be beautiful, but despite their purpose, they find their ways to be.
It takes courage to pray to someone knowing that gravity can ****** your words from the air and bring them right back down to the soles of your feet.
So when we question things like Heaven and wonder if that big blue sky is another bruise on someone else's Mother's arm, we find much more than answers.
We find that people are nothing extra, they are only themselves, some simply more than others.
We are more afraid of a silent and a hushed love than we could ever be of one that oozes too many words, so I will continue quieting the world until it is time to listen.
So yes,
hell exists.
But I refuse to believe it is a place, and as far as I am concerned it is a moment.
It may be one moment or millions of them, but hell is real once you understand that the people who are supposed to love you like bandages that cover burn marks, seem to be pretty good at starting fires when no one is looking.
These are just things I was thinking about on the car ride home after I ran into your Mother in the grocery store.
She said you still walk like there is sand in your shoes, and I realized that being in places isn't the same living in them.
We have bad habits of getting up and taking a few steps toward someone just to say we were there, and I hope you are guilty of
loving me from within the distance.

When we were born, we were asleep.
We may have been ******, and wet, and afraid, but we were asleep.
So we were miracles.
We walked without sight and we learned how to touch each other.
Slowly, like olive oil pouring from an open wound.

And we opened our eyes.
We looked for something to pray to, we looked for something to turn carpetburn and ****** knees into
blessings, unaware that heaven is not so quick,
and demons are not so hesitant.
We built Summer with a love that could not last.
We grew shade, not emerging from us,
but shade from glass and brick and
the shade that was beside us did not seem so great.
And we gave names to bark, and water, and gravel, and seed, and grass, and it was good.
And a few years later we held out our hand and we touched flame, and we touched mineral, and we touched machine, and bullets, and even stars, until we became everything that we only knew from our skin and our vision and we became less than what we were supposed to be.
We rode the sun to our palaces.
We loved everything as if it was dark,
We loved everything the way you would love something that didn't want a reminder.
And we saw this as good.
And we wept for the things that are simple.
And we wept for the things that were not so simple until
our eyes became coasts and we did not stop weeping.
And then we learned to jump.

The dirt and the heavens have sat and shown us everything at once, telling about the heart has grown gray hairs on it's brim waiting to be groomed.
I say they are roots, not hairs.
I say all the words anyone can ever spill into you are a rainstorm or a desert and they are going to make you wilt or drown you but either way you are as much of yourself as you can be.
We live in a world that is plagued with shadows that are taken apart by sun beams and sparks of the moon yet they do not know how to stop coming back to our hips like black horses that ride with what we allow Them to ride with.
And they sleep like they know there is a tomorrow, they have courage welded from wind and reverence from the cathedrals of giants that do not know how to be anything less than their very own purpose.
I think of the chapels of light, and the towers of dark, and how there are not even kingdoms filled with both of them, and I am reminded that they love each other too much to be consumed with the presence of one another knowing the world may stop it's dancing.
I hope come to be that way.
That I learn to love someones precense so much I cannot bare to be around it.
Infesting the night or the stars dictating the day as if something that cannot be held is not worth hoping for.
I think of what does not return and what does return, and ask that I have the wisdom to know the difference between what keeps me from seeing, and what has spent it's entire life giving my eyes gifts wrapped in flesh and blood and bone and filled with secrets not made to be kept on shelves or shoulders.
This world is not a child that can lie on your chest in slumber and fall asleep as easy as it wakes up. And I say, there cannot be evil where there is music, and that both what we give, and what we take, are the mosr beautiful thins our bodies can produce and that,

that is what is hidden in between shades of the Earth and her silence.
And from the loss and the blind places of land,
we run.

The year is 2095.
Religion is black and gold.
Reciting prayers are now the only way you can sleep, and all the conversations you had with others that never involved moving your mouth,
and I believe people smoke cigarettes because there is a salvation in being able to stop parts of you from growing that do not know how to do anything else. It occurred to me that we make everything before we even see it, and that is how extensive beauty spreads, it exists without acknowledgement, yet it is always there.

I woke up without my senses, not knowing the flavor of the string which holds these
linnens afloat on the laundry
of life's backyard, but I know it was where it was supposed to be, as most things are.
I do not believe in phantoms but I believe that when asking questions, there is always a response.
The world answers you back every time, and although
I have yet to understand the dust found between its proverbs that
I assume was beaten out of old rugs and woven from cobwebs.
What else is there?
I am constantly torn between being lost and being alive and looking for the difference.
Constantly torn between loving where you live, and trying to become
I found so many ways to be, that I never spent the time looking for ways to understand.