hands curl so tightly,
I can see the strain in your back as you pull yourself up
to the next hold.

silence falls across the hollow space
as we watch you in awe.
your hands rain white dust on our faces.

you turn sideways, press against the wall, dyno up and across,
and then you reach the top.

armor, stiff
a sword and skiff
black eyes
beard bathed in blood
and it's never enough

the thrill to ****
like ink and quill
both bleed and brim
and slice and trim

the knight
huzzah!
the pages yell
below the stages
with wooden weapons
and hungry eyes

he'll fight for queen
or country
or fun
he'll drag you down
throughout the town

his mother prays
his father's gone
his brother's train

the knight
he has no guilt left to cry
a quilt in the night
will muffle his fears
drowning in beers
until the kingdom falls,
a knight's knighthood calls!

pliant clay creases in your hands,
collected in the special place just off shore, below the waves.

good for the skin, it bakes onto flesh too easily in this heat,
and then comes off just as nicely.

you could shape it into anything, maybe an offering to the gods or a formless clump,

but you make a duckling out of it. Now it's sitting on the sill, staring out at the freshwater sea you birthed it from;

not from foam or anything special,
just the supple clay in the lake,

the cool respite of it, the way it allows life to make it so.

What do I have that is only mine?

Kindness is so simple.
But simplicity is so forgotten.
It's a pity that it's so rare.

She has short hair that sings with her smile
and she is still holding the hand of childhood innocence tightly -
I hope she doesn't ever let go.

beneath the door
a yellow line

what's happening
on the other side

hours gone
spent talking alone

wishing you
could go back home

a knock, a sigh,
a hushed goodbye

I'll be here till
the end is nigh

I'll be the bedrock of your home

I have  been grieving for you
every goodbye,

my entire life.

goodnight stars,
tomorrow I shall know the Sun -
its warmth and fire

today is always today
but tomorrow it will become yesterday
and we will be given a new present
do not forget these moments

The whole way in I thought about how courage is a ring,
and I found it on the hike

After lifetimes of silence,
the whole world quiets down
and we can see the beauty we have destroyed
from our windows and t.v screens.

When you protect a child's innocence,
they see the world more purely.
When you are the cause of their guilt,
they are misunderstood.
But children are much less fickle than opinions and rules and adults.
Adults change the world secondly,
children come and sadly go
but they always know
a little thing called
perspective.
They interpret the world with what they know
and what they know is what you give them.
What they need is a shield, a stuffy, a friend, and an influence.
Save the swords for adolescence.

the booth we all covet
is open and i sit in it alone
taking up all this space
so that i can try not to fall asleep
as i read and listen to music
and procrastinate on my laptop
and look at my phone
and feel the absences and the losses
of nameless entities
i am romanticizing the drone learning has become

i am tired
of this old routine
what does it mean?
ask the mayor
or the minister -
im sure their answers might be sinister
but why should I care now
when i never have before
because i see a little piece
which is a little less plain
than the traffic and the cranes
building more for my complaints
i am strained
i am trying to retain
but the knowledge i have gained,
it is vain and retiring
i am fine
just fine
just tired and trying

Two pairs of hands:
they coalesce in the drawl,
the duet shaping them
anew.
In the other room,
four bodies, carved by song.

how do i write something good to me,

something worth it?


something that holds me in that captured, raptured, fractured



memory?

the river never met the shore,
though knew it in a dream.
    
     the ocean never knew the moon -
     love based on tenuous beams.

perhaps the lesson here: implore!
on all those things that you adore.

do you forgive me

"You're not stressed, just bored."
Maybe. Maybe she is bored,
hence her crying in her room alone,
hence her panic attacks hiding in the closet,
hence her tired eyes glimmering with tears,
She is probably just bored.
How can you say that, how can you say that without caring if you break her self esteem, without regret fracturing your heart? How can you say that when you feel the heaviness of her chest as she enters the room, sitting there against the chair with her pale complexion and that look of defeat in her eyes? What kind of person thinks that boredom can destroy a little girl like that?
She is not bored, I promise you.
It is much worse.
She is breaking.
And you just added a crack to her spine,
dismissing her heart like it was nothing.
She is not nothing. She is my everything, but she thinks that she is nothing because you said that she was bored and that the monster in her chest, feeding on her blood supply was a butterfly instead.
How can you say that?

True freedom is letting go.

in a dream, the frozen expanse brims with colder water

but her and her father stood still as the water hummed below them, seeped through the cracks

a voice caught in the throat, a psalm for this frozen bay

as winter swells with yearning for the sparrow, for the stream.

I'll be here when the snow is frozen over,
Kissed by moonlights ethereal glow,
And when its gaze emits exposure
To the humming, frozen undertow,

The lake will groan in midnignt's cover,
And in the morning light as mists suffuse,
Revealing ice: dawn's venerated lover,
A winter tryst and draped in pale blues.

all I want is to dance, in the deep of the night
in a room full of people. we only have short years until
it's wrong to go out and dance. let me dance
with my friends, it's the middle of the
night; I can people watch. Looking back
on last night, we were like a school of fish
with shimmery emerald bodies.

I told her not to stuff her mushrooms up the chimney.
Not to brew any potions.

Here I am, stuffing my chimney and downing elixirs.
Elixirs that aren't even mine.

I speak so loudly
and in anger but you do not hear me
because in anger
I will hold my thoughts like breath
hoping, needlessly
that you will see and hear
my wrath;

only away does it subside into the atmosphere

My teacher once said that the basis of all our knowledge comes from kindergarten.
Don't hit, be kind.
She said children don't have filters for people who look, sound, believe, think, different from them.
She said children are kinder because they don't care about anything except the need to be nurtured.
And in turn, the little ones will smile and give you a seed,
one that grows into a flower of purity.

A pretty little precipice as I look down.
Oops, I went over. I am going to drown.

on a northern shore, the air bites, even in june;

once, it was warm, but that is just a wish now. crouched in a chair,

I feel small raindrops brush over the pages of my book,

shaking as my stiff fingers flip through it on this slow day. This is the port where

the rich americans flock on their cruise, gold chained and wrapped in lovely fur coats,

while the people down here wear their thin uniforms and wake before dawn.

*** and him.
In a bag. In a memory.
in a long while ago.

Forget me not,
or if you do,
I promise to
forgive you.

--Can if you
really want to,
if you're through
with nothing to do.

sisters so akin like skin and bone,
thoughts aligned,
words not shared
but known
arms that feel like home

love that never walks alone

Love is always fire,
pretty or pretty destructive.

Hate is always ice,
forever or ever cold.

Sadness is always an abyss
salty water, sinking, drowning.

And you and I are magnets.
I hold you close and then you are untouchable yet attached.

passion is a flame,
the body is just an urn.
let your soul be free

lesson 1:

you are born with some innocence
and you lose it.
someday in your eighty's, maybe,
or early on too.
how you lose it is a different lesson
and to be honest I'm not entirely sure how.

but children often have some,
so don't take it.
innocence is a candle wick,
deminitioning by the moment.
hold off on lighting their candle.

I prayed for her.
Please God, if this is the last thing I ever ask of you, give her the strength and hope to surge through.
Please do.
I wish I could take it instead of her.
I wish she didn't have to suffer alone.
But isn't it the things we mind that help us appreciate the things we love?
Still. I hate it when she hurts.

if I am being honest with myself for a moment,
all I want is to kiss you now.
I was too afraid to know it.

Distance has made me look back

Short and sweet,
it's what I eat.

Maybe I miss
the long things written
but with the short and sweet
I am smitten.

rosemary and romeo begin with a letter

another sun to burn a fire in me,
to shake the frozen lake down to its core
she's young but once she was an ancient tree,

she's not a flower anymore.

all the lines in my hands, they...
I trace them quite often with an empty pen.
They map out my future, my being, who I am.
Who am I? I am the tectonic plates of earthquakes,
and you, my sweet child,
are the burning magma moving me into a new puzzle.

What did I learn today?
I couldn't tell you.
I am afraid of what the future holds,
though in Time's arms,
I'm just a little girl having nightmares about the next eternity.
I feel like I'm dust to the universe
and other times I am the universe,
all the gravity spinning me around,
stars in some spots,
but utter darkness everywhere else.
I either expand or contract,
******* all the life out if you forget your space suit.
Why should a little girl have troubles such as these,
I never wonder.
More like:
why am I lost in an odyssey of myself?