Your heart is a vast ocean
of enormous and unknown depth
and I have heard the calm
comforting whispers of the waves
and the siren songs
of the mermaids hidden
below the surface
and there is a sky as long
and infinite as the night
bordering its every soft edge

I cannot remember falling
or diving in
but I find myself sinking
and drowning in its delicate warmth
and it isn’t that I have forgotten
how to swim
or that I am too tired
to stay afloat
but it is here in these waters
that drowning makes me feel
more alive than I ever
would have imagined possible before

it is a comfortable fear
a quite trembling of of nerves
a temptation to abandon
the peace of solitude
and the longing desperation

here is where I can die
exhaling my last breath
knowing that all I lived through
and for
was worth it in the end
that the brief moment
my life stretched itself
over the long horizon of eternity
I had truly found something
that made everything in life
more beautiful than love

Some tears have
their own heartbeats

their own pulse

and they stain our souls
with the beauty
that is only felt when touched
by the truth of eternal love

I shed those tears
every time I gaze up
at the infinite night sky
and hear every single star
sing your name

I start to write into a
puddle of metaphors
meant to be a love poem
and as I write down
the word love
for the thousandth
of the thousandth time

I accidentally misspell it...

...with the letters
of your name...

and I know visually
that it looks wrong on paper
but when I hear it in my head
it sounds right
and now I can’t quite remember
any other way to spell it

and thats not really the worst of it
because I’m really just rewriting
the same poem over and over again
somehow hoping that rearranging
the letters and the words
will somehow align the stars in heaven
causing my heartbeat to sync with yours
and somehow you will just know how I feel
and I won’t have to stutter
and stammer and choke on the words

because every time
you’re are sitting across from me
or standing anywhere near me
or being anywhere out there
in the world breathing
while just being you
causes my mouth and my hands
and my body
and the whole world around me
to tremble
as I begin
to feel so dangerously close
to not feeling so alone

and alone is a thing
I have grown to be
incredibly comfortably with
alone is a safe heaven
of quite and peaceful solitude
where pain is a thing
easily stitched away
inside secret pockets
of regret
that nobody knows about

alone is something that has
become the best friend
my heart has ever known
a secret companion
no one can steal away from me
the person that knows everything
about me that is too embarrassing
or strange
or heartbreaking to talk about

it knows things that
I don’t even know about myself

I am sure that I am
about to be swallowed
by some armageddon level event
and be forgotten by history
because this isn’t the kind of story
that i get to be a part of
except for the character
that no one notices
so there is no need to remember
who I was
or how when I thought
I misspelled the word love
with the letters of your name
was the first
and only  time
I ever actually got it right

The fresh new day
of school has come
and for some children
in the days ahead
oh what fun


until...

BANG!BANG!

Your kid is dead
oh why oh why
didn’t we listen
to the dead

why oh why
didn’t we do anything
but think and pray

oh how oh how
didn’t this problem
go away

no more bobby
no more sue
as we throw our hands
in the air again
pretending there is nothing
we can do

but hope and hope
it doesn’t happen
at our kids school

BANG!BANG!

money beats on its drum
while the greedy dance
on the graves
of the futures
they stole away

politicians giving
hollow speeches
while shaking hands
with morticians
who give the dead ones
a pretty smile
and dress them
in their dead days best

and cheat the live ones
of a good education
one plus one is two
and if you
make enough money
you can get away
with ****** too

BANG!BANG!

we watch in
horror and disbelief
at parents stricken
down with grief
because their child’s heart
no longer beats

we just cant believe
its true
surely this didn’t happen

again

at a school

No, no...

I could have sworn
just the other day
I heard my neighbors say
these can of things
DON’T
happen here

my neighbors over there
standing above the grave
of their child
they never imagined
would die this way

BANG!BANG!

the time has come
to teach ourselves
a better solution
than the letting
those with money
control the violence
of the gun

I looked up from my sketch pad
and for a brief moment
saw how beautifully perfect
life can be

and isn’t that all we have

just moments

and in that moment
I found that every now and then
life can be something
even more beautiful than love

What if we are nothing more
than the delirium of a dream
some figment of undigested madness
in the bowels of a god
dying from starvation
in the belly of a worm
as it writhes from dehydration
baking helplessly in the sun

so dangerously close to oblivion
yet so obliviously unaware
sleeping through our lives
to avoid the pain of the disappointment
of not living out our dreams

and what if it is so easy
as opening our eyes
to see what it is
that we could be
if we dared ourselves
to step beyond our potential
and reach past
what we thought
was beyond our reach

What if?

What if we could become
something more beautiful than love

The truth is, I probably love you...
and what i mean by that is...
I love you...
and that is to say I have loved you
since I first heard your voice
and lifted my head
and saw you walking away

that may seem odd
or improbable or impossible
but I recognized that feeling instantly
and though it was odd
and improbable and impossible
it dug its way straight into my heart
and it made it self comfortable
and stretched out and stayed there

though it was sometime
before I saw you again
and then even longer
before I ever heard your name
and much longer before I sat
at the same table as you sipping coffee
and all that was a long time ago I know
but it feels as if it all may have
just happened around the corner
five seconds ago

I may be rambling
because I really don’t know
how to talk about these things
and I am not really that good
at talking in general
and its even worse when its
with a living person
that I know I love
but have failed to mention
that fact
to that person

and the best option
always seems to me
is to pack my bags
and move to the other side
of the world
and never talk to that person again

because wouldn’t that be easier
than rejection
or worse...
acceptance
because acceptance
can often lead to failure
and if I check my track record
that is exactly where it has lead
ever time so far

also in the side notes
it mentions that
i am i hopeless romantic
so the fact that I seem hopeful
every time I hear your voice
and every time i see you
just seems to point to that cliff
were I always find myself
tumbling head over heels
and down into the shards
of stuttering bad poetry
and pillow cases filled with bricks
made out of tears
carved out of the infinite ocean
of my own stupidity

and that seems to be my life so far
something to laugh at
that isn’t funny
but thats ok
because it’s more of a nervous laugh

so the truth is, I probably love you...
and what i mean by that is...
I love you...
and that is to say
I will most likely drown
in my own stupidity
before you ever know