I promised my mother that I would never smoke cigarettes but here I am with you. It seems to be that I am addicted and you are the nicotine, how cliché. I remember in middle school when someone showed me how battery acid melts styrofoam instantly, and that was just one of the many deadly chemicals in those little white sticks. I imagine your touch to be something like that, my skin melting to the bone as you pour yourself over me. It's funny, because I watched my mother smoke for years, when she were upset or anxious she would smoke more to feed her addiction and calm down; I think I may have found my newest addiction. There is something so flammable about you and I will light you over and over again and inhale you because I need a rush. Soon it will turn into a dependency but I don't mind. "I can quit anytime." know I promised I would never touch those cancer sticks but if that was the only form I could find you in, I would smoke a pack a day for the rest of my life.

Don't be afraid of the hell everyone else see's.

See hell as a nice place, and you'll never be scared of it.

Broken glass covers the floor
The smell of alcohol fills the air
Ever since you walked out my door
Life has been filled with such despair
Best friends forever
Turned out to be the sweetest of lies
Because broken people are always abandoned
It was only a matter of time
Before you grew sick of the sadness
The endless darkness inside
Of me, hopeless, depressed, damaged
You didn't even say goodbye

how am I ever supposed to feel at home again?
when your eyes were like a fireplace - warming me, and lighting my way
my home is so far away now that you are gone
I was never anything to you, I understand that
you were never really much to me either, until you left

the house I live in is just bricks and mortar, torn away wallpaper
and numbed down memories of a childhood I can scarce remember
what is a house of stones and wood compared to a home
of warm flesh and eyes like the pools of water that only exist in my mind?
a home with arms that can hold you safe, not walls that keep you restrained

have you ever been told to simply "*******" and been left stranded somewhere?
or kicked out of a party at 3 am in the winter and forced to walk 7 miles
back to your house, all the while you're still a little drunk, staggering a little
left feeling like your feet are somewhere else because you're so cold and you didn't think
to bring a sweater. Or you didn't want to, because the only ones you have used to be his.

I lost my train of thought, that tends to happen when I think of you
when you walked away, it felt like being kicked out of the only place I felt I belonged
no wonder the concept of a stable home is so hard for me to comprehend
after the storm that you took in your stride and threw upon me, then left me with, alone.

stable? I don't know stable after knowing you. You were a hurricane of fiercest proportions
you were long limbs that wrapped me up a little too tight, and screamed at me
told me you were home, and I was yours. You were a home that left me house bound
to the point you stopped feeling like a home, until you apologised for everything
and now it's been a long time since I last spoke to you, not long enough, but too long
and you still feel like a home to me

My right ear has triple tinnitus.
It's true. I kid you not.
First there is the deep, low mourn of a foghorn,
with a louder high pitched ring above.
But stuck somewhere in between
is a beautifully sad Charlie Parker saxophone number.
It's soft notes range frome mid to low and drown
the foghorn and annoying ring while carrying
me away to dream.   My own nightly internal
Charlie Parker radio.

r ~  23Jan14

my biggest fear is that i will
stop wanting to become more
than the person i already am

(i will not settle for just getting by
any longer; i want to be
magnificent)

Don't ask me what it means to love someone. As I can tell you from experience, I throw the word "love" away like they were colorful strings of beads at a Mardigras Parade, abundant and seductive but no one throws them back.

Love is a feeling I have always understood as something that is omnipresent. Not once did I believe in money making the world go round, but I believed it was love that propelled us all to keep moving forward, keep the earth dancing in awkward circles. We love the sun so much we spin around it. It loves us back enough to embrace us in it's gravity and keep us from spiraling into the deep abyss of space, from colliding with other heavenly bodies. I think the Earth fell in love with the fickle moon a long time ago that I refused to let it go. Their mutual love for each other keeps the tides turning, making the oceans weep when time comes when the moon has to disappear for a while. Once upon a time the sun fell in love with the moon that day after day He chases after Her, knowing he will never be able to catch her. Love is why, in beautiful and nostalgic synchronization with the earth, we crane our necks in tandem with the ground beneath our feet in order to drink in the sparkling stars, the languorous nebulae, endless skies.

For years there has been a struggle to find this elusive creature, this champion's prize of life. This is my lost treasure, the rare blue butterfly. I try my very hardest to capture it and keep it in my hands but love is a viscous creature that bites and scratches, fickle and changes its mind. It grows tired and weary, the firefly that flickers in and out of light. The journey towards it is plagued with dangers: false prophets that guide you in cruel misdirection, the twisted forms of evil that mimic the drug, the broken hearts that litter the road and the miles of distance you have to walk until your tired feet bring you to where you and he will meet.

I beg you, do not ask me to define love! I am the one who does not know what it is because I recognize it all too well and fall in love four times each morning and six times each evening. I fall in love with the world in the quiet of that space between sleep and waking, the moment that blurs on the border between the darkest hour of night and the first light of dawn. I fall in love with the green spirit of mother nature in the rustling of trees, the complex patterns in the colors of flowers and at the same time, I fall in love with ugly urban cities-- love it for all it's decrepit, urban decay. I love it's slow deterioration.

I love people, too. I love the boy in the coffee shop corner with his nose buried in a book. I love the mother when she calls her child that nickname only they share. I love it when people are kind and loving, and sweet and caring. I love it when I see their faces when they realize that they are a whole part of something bigger, a cog in the machine that is the world. I love then when they are sad or hurt in my smiles and warm hugs, just to make them feel less lonely when they are. I love them when they need a little bit of a reprieve from the hopelessness that pervades the very air we breath. I love them at their best and at their worst for people are just melancholic souls, restless feet and sentimental hearts that beat in unison with the cars that honk, the bass that plays and the atoms that give life and energy.

Is that not what love is? Is it not supposed to be kind? Is it not supposed to go above and beyond the ordinary, the boring and go borderline insane? It should be maddened with lust and passion, fueled by hope and everlasting desire. Should it not be allowed to be happy when it is and morose when it needs to? Lovers should understand that love is never constant but that lovers should, like vines that intertwine, hold fast and have an impending and irrefutable fear of losing and letting go.

Do not ask me what is love because I know its many faces and its many forms. Do not ask me about love because each one is different, and each one is uniquely yours.