at birth, they tried to swap the stars in my eyes for dollar signs-
but the operation didn't take.
so for years, i felt oddly compelled to fake it
until i finally couldn't take it any longer.
keep all your shiny, broken things...
i just want the trees.
and a breeze,
and the pebbles,
and the rain.
i'll stick around to love all of the beauty you've forsaken.
i just want the things that no one can keep.
an intellectual alien,
trapped in a generation bringing nothing
but plastic beads and decoder rings to the table.
faint, fickle beings,
painting their faces
so that they can all look just the same.
sometimes it's a blessing to feel out of place.
so, i'll wisely spend my time stuck under a bad sign,
and continue building things that can't be touched,
and treasuring things that can't be held-
just felt.
i wanna feel it all.
i want to fall madly in love,
make masterpieces of my memories,
and hopefully,
turn other peoples memories of me
into one of the most beautiful things they've ever seen.
i'm going to be good,
and kind,
and light,
and keep my fingers crossed that others i encounter
will finally decide to let go,
and enjoy the ride.
to surf the tide
rather than struggle and squirm in the waves.
what gorgeous creatures we would be
if we could finally see
just how hideously we treat other beings.
stop thinking about "ME",
and start worrying about "WE".
because we,
as a whole,
are in some serious ******* trouble.
so please, stop.
stop running, start dancing.
stop screaming, start laughing.
and please,
for the sake of all existence,
stop buying in to all of this *******.
life is not an endless quest to acquire the most over-priced garbage,
it's a journey through time and space to make yourself,
to love all that surrounds you,
and to learn to value yourself more than you value your brand new pair of perky ****.
we weren't sculpted of plastic and silicone,
we were forged of raw stardust.
it's time that we rise to the occasion of being bodies of light,
and make the darkness of night seem at least a little less lonely.
"the things you own end up owning you",
and i refuse to be enslaved.
i long for the days when free-thinkers were the cream of the crop,
now, they're lining up the firing squad
to mock and gawk at those too brave to "baa" with the rest of the flock.

diamonds and navy strung together by a row of brass buttons trailing up your chest;
your flesh is the night sky,
and i...
have always been a clumsy astronomer.
tumbling through the footnotes of books i pretend to have read-
searching for applicable knowledge and definitions that at least begin to pay you homage.
blissful in the sun beams and sullen in sudden rain-storms...
though,
you glow,
regardless of the natural disaster trailing in the wake of jet-streams out your window.
you translate the smoke signals trailing from the tails of our cigarettes,
and the morse-code transcriptions of my off-beat heart.
such a beautiful transistor of the divine gift of speech.
such a handsome mystic.
make me magic-
paint me natural...
leave me stranded in your starlight.
a tidal metronome to my unsteady pulse,
composing arrhythmia's barefoot in the night.
tap-dance with me in the graves we're digging deeper with every passing instant.
in comparison,
this could be penned a bad decision,
but those seem to be the only kind that the creatively maladjusted are ever capable of making.
perhaps we're cliche...
but the only person i care to find in a crowd is you,
and you stick out like the sore arm of a spiraling universe.
pearls and coal grey strung together by a row of silver buttons trailing up your chest;
your flesh is the night sky,
and i...
have always been a clumsy astronomer.
let me study your pulse through a fogging telescopes lens.

a heavily decorated door creaks open to disturb the silence-
"why don't you turn on the light?" he asks her,
but she likes the shape of the night;
the way the sky hugs close to the earth and resembles the bell of a glass cover over a cake on a bakery counter.
"life is sweet like that..." she sings,
"like a pastry on display,
something sweet that we can taste."
there's a certain way of looking at it.
your eyes half closed,
one hand high on a hip and the other clasping a cigarette.
"yeah,
i mean,
i guess that makes sense..."

"one ******* roll!"
of the drum,
of a car,
of our calendar.
things have changed.
the universe is stretching,
the earth has grown;
and so has she,
into a species of flower that can't be grown indoors no matter how many lamps you point at her face-
she needs the sun...
and the wild.
let her grow free in the sun of foreign hillsides,
by a creek in the meadow she's dreamt of for years...
with the fruit farms.
"yeah...the fruit farms." she smiles.
she's always wanted to sell fruit on the highway a few miles from the farm she'll own,
on land she bought,
in a house she built,
feasting daily upon earthly treasures she grew
in the dirt
with her hands.
let her feed you a story for breakfast;
a picture she'll paint with scenes of her dreams that she only occasionally shares...
when the mood is hopeful and kind and she's not worried about anyone laughing.
listen to her heart;
type-writer keys over the hum of radio space.
rest your head-
ear pressed to her chest;
listen.
like curious neighbors in the backyard in the sleepy hours of the weekend between breakfast and lunch,
coffee and cartoons.
let her show you one of her dreams.
a prized,
***** pebble she keeps cradled in a pocket full of lint.
she's an old soul...
peering through dirt colored eyes just as wide as a child's.

"it's been a long time since i've seen the ocean..."
she whispers to herself under the last drag of her third cigarette.

but she hates the beach,
and the crowds of the vain who gather there to worship starving,
sacred bodies;
she just likes the sound.
the throaty yell of prehistoric waves breaking over zagging shorelines.
she says the sound "helps her dream."
it doesn't "help" her dream,
nothing helps her sleep...
it just makes her think;
of unimaginable beasts that have swam in our seas,
and the shape she's been told that the continents once made.
she thinks of mer-maids and voyagers and the rustic ship that brought her great-grandmother over at age thirteen...
this time she's not dreaming,
just remembering things that she's never seen.
her ***** feet need a stroll through the sands of a pristine scene-
she's heard such thing used to exist.

she mumbles, "it hurts to know that nothing is sacred..."

but she is.
a mess of tangled heart-strings and sentences,
she's sacred.
and so are the four tiny walls that hide her from the world.

i found a weathered love note pressed into the breast pocket of a second hand wool coat...
the year pre-dates my existence,
but it's addressed to me and signed with a moon beam.
it reads like a perfectly orchestrated symphony of strings of small silver bells swinging from the trees in a breeze,
and a melancholy hum of distant thunder as her luminous soul mate tap-dances his way through humid states in flashes of raw,
and sacred light.
it reads like an epitaph-
a stumbled upon testimony to the life of a stranger that makes you fall to your knees
that simply begs you to weep...
and to wonder;
if you should have said goodbye...
or if you could have locked the open door long before the sweetness of life you so surely insist that you've found fled through it.
it reads like a note taped to the bathroom mirror in the handwriting of a concerned friend...
reminding you of your likely survival,
of the possibilities of each and every sunrise,
and of dollar beer night down town.
it reads like the author had meant it.

"my dearest stardust," it begins,
"how forcefully bright you are destined to shine...
you are built of light,
of ancient celestial wisdom.
you're a beacon
a light house on a foggy shore guiding lonely sailors back to where their hearts belong.
your heart-songs are the articulacy of a thousand life-times forgotten.
each note flies from your lips as you forge them with force...
like speeding bullets sent out into the universe destined to slay the way we fear ourselves.
don't let the darkness find you;
never let anything thin out your glow or drown out your melody.
you are magic;
the type of thing we cling to-
as children and as dreamers.
you are a mother to every orphaned flight plan and exit strategy...
an escape artist painting door frames on surfaces not meant to be defaced.
you end up everywhere,
and you have everywhere to run.
you overflow from poorly stretched canvasses,
to broken spines of dusty books,
and back into the heart of a lonely traveler's compass rose.
let your self be magic
be aqueous
be fluid and refreshing like the rain-storm that you are.
you're the desert
the sands of time
you're quickly fleeting and quick to run.
you're a dying breed.
and we,
the lights of the sky,
treasure you.
we remind you of this in every comet's tail and every clear wyoming night sky.
all of our love."

and i can feel it
flashing before me in every stranger's eyes
it is real...
we are magic.

mooshed up stubs of cigarettes swell in flooded ashtrays,
like fishies who gave up swimming to skim the surface,
belly first.
everything looks ancient when the sunlight is a muted grey.
this is not my home.
clouds part momentarily,
and a slice of off-white jet stream gets enveloped by a crying sky;
someone said, "you won't grow if you don't weep."
well, don't weep for me.
the smell of wet dirt,
wet leaves,
and wet concrete
waltz in through the drafty windows,
leading the parade of nostalgia breaking me down.
why in the **** did i ever grow up.
now it's rent checks,
passed-due notices,
and borrowing money so that the dogs can finally eat.
this isn't the 'me' i once loved.
i was a fearless leader of the rain-coat regime,
leading a fleet of one-thousand wax-paper sail boats to victory
over the tyranny of the rain gutter.
i was brave then.
a renegade cowgirl of the final frontier,
adorned in costume jewelry and mud stained over-alls.
i built ships to shred the sky,
and bring home my mother all of saturn's hula-hoop rings,
and every bouncy-ball on mars.
she always said my treasures were worth millions;
but i didn't want the money, then.
i wanted adventures.
with dirt roads and ***** toads and sandwiches smashed to ****
by rouge apples set in the cooler.
i wanted to hold the map,
and the compass,
and feel like the captain of our red-desert sea.
i wanted to see for myself everything that the horizon had to give me.
see,
at that age,
i knew i'd live forever.
but at this age,
i know i'm bound to slowly die.
i'd give every penny to my name
to get back to the days
where even the rain didn't stop me from playing.
to when "dressing like a princess" entailed mom's red apron,
dad's harley davidson cap,
and little brother's rain boots.
i haven't felt like a princess since.
i just feel like a failure,
and it hurts.
i don't even know where i learned the word,
but i promise,
i regret it.
so i'll wish on this cheap bottle of whiskey,
and the glass that i'll drink from,
to go back.
to be five again.
to be set next to my mother's type writer,
whispering the words to the newest tall-tale i'd woven,
and watching her type out my dreams for me with her perfectly slender fingers,
one sticky key at a time.
it always sounded just like rain drops.

run into the crested shorelines where the greatest empires have fallen,
and kiss the tides of the salty sea in hopes of calming your clumsy pulse and flippant thoughts.

stretch your legs.
limber up like a prideful little boy before a rigged game of lava-monster...
and run!

run like your shoes will never untie and your heavy feet will never misfire.

run to the reams of yellowing pages you cling to,
full of ball-point memoir metaphors and pithy,
expressive descriptions of the beautiful women you've trained yourself to hate along the way.
don't get friendly with your paintbrush when you reminisce this time.

run.
full-fledged, snot-nosed, scared-shitless-grinned
sprint.

run to itchy cotton bedding drenched in the stench of day-dreams and nightmares;
peppered with heaps of insight they've yet to diagnose,
and one cold pillow
that can never seem to lull your static head to sleep or fully support the weight of your heavily burdened shoulders.

run like it doesn't mean anything for once;
like a wide-eyed kid who's never seen a map or compass,
he just zigs and zags through the seemingly limitless emerald velvet at full speed as he navigates the backyard in pure and honest bliss.

run to sun-soaked golden fields where the night sky tints itself purple to reach the perfect shade of darkness,
and your breath hangs low on the tops of the tall grass like the fog hanging over a prehistoric low-land,
and the stars shine like slicked-up pebbles about to let you decode the mystical secrets they hold...
and everything comes clear
and clean
and calm.

run free
and wild
and nameless
like it's the only thing you've ever known,
until you're ready to run back into me.

i lick the rain from my lips
and kiss the moon goodnight in hopes of tasting the stars that you dream under
when you're lucky enough to sleep beneath a clear sky
and for your sake
i hope the clouds will always part for you come nightfall

and i wish the sun to dance across the apples of your cheeks as you smile
as sunbeams dot your face with pigmented music notes
and constellations waiting to be named

i hope you're smiling now
and day-dreaming
of rugged landscapes fading to rust as the thunder whispers the blues through the stillest night

i hope you smile when you think of me

seated around a cluttered table with extension cord lighting and a cheap beer
or rambling down a dirt road
or a metra track

don't forget that i'm magic
and that you are too

i hope that your favorite flowers bloom in fragrant plumes wafting high enough to cross the heavily guarded walls you've resurrected

i hope you won't spend a single second scared
or lonely
out there in the "great wide open"

but mostly i hope you'll never forget the road back west
to the desert dust i flourish in