ask your blood
your limbs, your breathing feet
what Poetry is -
a phylogenetic anomaly
in light’s discontinuity

or just…
the strange yearning of hematopoiesis

ask the silence in your lungs
the bursting DNA, reinterpreted
how it allures memory inside your bones
how it treads conventions of sleep
with the weight of a sigh

if you ask me
what Poetry is
I’d say: breath calligraphy
a winged dream of depth
on enchanted retina
the bitter-sweet art of airy harmony

ask your hands
what Poetry is
perhaps they’ll take a moment
to bloom

Love is the crushed diamond white of summer snow, blemished with frost burned sprouts and the last of fall’s molding leaves. It sprinkles the road like powdered sugar, glittering in the sunshine and merging with melting rain. The snow is not perfect- It has little hills and footprints and muddy swirls, ringed by spring finches chirping petulantly over the bruised cherries that have rolled on down the hill. A worn red scarf loops round a carrot in a pile of melted frost, coal pieces staining the white ground gray. The footprints on the ground are from two people dancing to music that flows between them, sending the birds squawking and shadowing the flowers that twist and vine out of the winter, smelling like pure sweetness when crushed below twirling feet.  The powdered sugar snow is not perfectly spread, but standing still has never been the best way to dance.

I hope you choke on the names of our would be children
when it happens to cross into your thoughts
the few nights you don't sink into bed ****** out of your mind

I hope you ***** down the hallway thinking of me
I hope you never make it to the bathroom on time
I hope your stomach acid burns like a ripcord up your trachea

You told me no one had good ***** like I did
And he said it, too
Every last time I cheated on you

Just remember you betrayed me first
Told me to **** someone to put equality back into the universe

It's sad to say I did it out of spite
I could have been loyal

Instead we let each other become driftwood
burning blue and green
and floated away without a fight

Hi.
Can I just say that you’re beautiful?
I can’t see you.
I can’t hear you.
I don’t know if you can sing like an angel or are as off key as a drunkard on Christmas.
I don’t know if you’re porcelain pale or have laugh lines and freckles on your cheeks.
This isn’t a pick-up line.
There’s no punchline cause there’s no joke.
Just me.
Ordinary, imperfect, me, telling you that you’re beautiful.
It needed to be said.
It needed to be said because I’m one thousand percent sure that you’ve never said it to yourself.
I’m one thousand percent sure that you’ve never looked in a mirror and loved every single little part of you.
I’m pretty sure that you’ve looked into a mirror and said ‘Heck yeah, I’m lookin’ fiiine today’
But fine is…well…fine.
It’s not beautiful.
And today means today.
Not every day.
So, hi.
I don’t know your name.
I don’t know where you’re from or where you’re going.
I don’t know the color of your skin or the pigment of your dreams or who you love with an infinity that burrows itself into the very tip of your bones.
Quite frankly, I don’t need to.
Some cultures have a tradition of naming people for their personality. I don’t know you, but I’m sure you’re a thousand scribbles of a pencil knotted in lovely uncoordinated whorls that paint themselves into a smile.
I don’t know those scribbles
So, for now, you are Beautiful.
Beautiful, and I don’t care whether you think that’s a cotton candy sweet cliche or not, Beautiful your name is every single piece of you that locks together with puzzle pieces that only fit you, Beautiful, you are highs and lows and tears and laughter, a soul that soaks up warmth like it’s sunlight and huddles away from the cold by blowing on sparks of imagination.
Beautiful is the name that spreads your heart out until it fills your chest, pushing against your breastbone until it feels like there’s an ache, right there, from pure joy.
Beauty is not perfect.
Perfect is cold, so very very cold.
Beautiful, you are not perfect.
That does not mean you are not Beautiful.
You are every single facet of your mind, body, and soul, mirroring off each other in endless harmony, sharp love and soft frustration, pushing billions of molecules aside every second with just a tap of your finger.
Aren’t you extraordinary?
Call yourself Beautiful, call yourself by your name, say it as softly as you need to, as loud as you can bear it, let it fill you, take you in, take every part of your beautiful self in. You don’t have to smile if you don’t need to, but let sink into your muscles and your blood, let it blink out of the tips of your fingers.
You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t have do be perfect. You just don’t have to.
Because beautiful is not trying.
Beautiful is just being you.

From the one who needed to hear it most,

Hey beautiful.

The Earth
is one big ball of twine
Every person has a piece of string lacing up their leg, like ballet slippers that you can walk on
You don’t dance through life on pedestrian slippers
There’s no form of tap, jazz, or hip-hop that’ll keep you from knotting your threads with mine
So as you sit in a cafe in Paris
sipping limonade and watching the river of people on the Champs-Elysees
You’ll pretend you don’t feel a tug on your ankle
from that the little fille in Hong Kong who got an A on her test
the teenager kneeling down to rest a rose on the cross with a Jewish étoile
the old man letting out the sail as his bow skims la ocean
As you stand up from the cafe table let yourself be pulled into a dance
People these days
abuelo says
like people are spit off the tip of his tongue
People these days
always rushing to a place they don’t have to get to yet
Back in my day
in my dia
everything
was
just
slow
Back in your day abuelo
Back in your day
there weren’t seven billion people that had dance slippers made of twine
there weren’t so many playing cat’s cradle with their feet
People rush because they do have somewhere to go
Somewhere to be
obviously, that somewhere to be is not where they’re rushing to
obviously, they wouldn’t go where they’re being pulled
obviously, abuelo

So my abuelo can tap his feet to seven billion cats‘s cradles
As you scrape your feet along french pavestones in Paris
And the twine will knot and twist and make all of us dance
to the beat of the world instead of the beat of sound
because music is made using hands, not feet
and under your feet
there’ll be a ring ring ring
from an Earth made of twine
the best sort of telephones
were always the ones made of Campbell’s soup and string
and as the world goes to voicemail
you might tap answer with your feet
say a prayer-
miss you, please-
I’m sorry, I didn’t-
There’s no way-
What? I can’t-
On that off sort of chance
You pressed answer
and all the messages come flooding in
Pressing answer is like cutting a wire
the electricity sparks and freezes
the caller is stuck
Your answer is like trying to speak over a jet engine to someone underwater
Silence is the loudest muffler for anyone who
Doesn’t want to hear it-
You just don’t understand-
I can’t believe you!-
Wrong, you’re wrong-
Someone else hears a ring from their soup-can-and-twine
You let your’s drop down and tangle with ballet shoes made for walking

Humans are alive for one hundred years
People only live for eighty or so
From when you were a little baby, you’ve felt the beat of a thousand hearts
The breath of a thousand dreams
The spark of a thousand smiles
Through the ribbons of twine that wound up your ankles
But the older you get
The more you fray
And it shows in bruised eyes, callused fingers, wintered hair
That you’ve been walking for as many days as the earth is wide
Collected enough footprints to feed a soul on stories
And when you die
mourir
pethaíno̱
umierać
Death cuts your string with his blunt-honed scythe
Your voice goes from the twine that twisted up your ankles
To the crystallized light that filters in between the leaves of trees
The crackle of firewood on a misty evening
The waves that slip on shell-laden sand
You won’t move so much as whisper
Talk so much as laugh
Be so much as exist
The earth is a ball of twine
We all walk in pedestrian ballet slippers
Die into beauty that we’d never thought we’d flow to
Never going where we need to or where we want to be
Your string is caught up in a thousand others
Twisted with mis-steps and calls made over soup cans
We are a thousand beats off rhythm in melody
A thousand stories in tugs and sound


Welcome to Earth
A world of 7 billion connections
Silence instead of answers
Once thousand languages to say seven billion stories
french pavestones in Paris
abuelos who step in rhythm
Dead who live in warmth
Welcome to earth
Population: twined

I hate reading you my writing. you've seen my skin split but that is nothing compared to this. I won't let you look at me because I am so afraid you might see how sorry I am. you can turn away but guilt is ebbing from your spine and I absorb it's heaving glow. I bet you didn't know flowers grow towards the sun
2. if I could count how many times I think you've lied to me I would need a thousand hands. every finger would be calloused and burnt but veracious. I've dived into glacial waters and lost perception of the surface. when I see the sky, I swim down to touch the sand
3. I once was with a boy who fell into an abyss of addiction. fourteen months of malicious intentions that rendered me to ash. now I am smeared across your mattress and swept into the cracked marble corner of the window sill, kissed by the silk rhythm of the curtains. I am the needles you dropped on your carpet. I would give you all of me but you don't want a fraction. you know, that boy had my ring that said "I Love You" and he tossed it in the lake. I had another that said "Always" and it's somewhere in your home now. the lake will dry before I ever see your bedroom again
4. you have more lyrics memorized than words printed in a novel. the backroads of Carolina are veiled by tree branches but these streets only seem significant when you're singing in the backseat of my car with your head cutting through the wind and your palms caressing the curves of the atmosphere. and after all, she is much more lovely than I. you recite songs we've heard in the exact locations where they flowed through us for the first time, although it's been months since we've listened. you can remember every time we've ever ****** but not one time you've grabbed my hands
5. we fell in love in the winter. it is so **** warm outside. I hate it because I can no longer become entangled beneath blankets heated by your body. you love it because there are a hundred places to be now. all of them without me. but it's the lack of words from you that destroys me much more than your dexterity. if you can kiss the hickeys on my neck why not the scars along my chest? why are there scratches marking up your frame like a road map and knive handles sticking from my back? twist them and I'll scream, cut me and I'll bleed, but nothing you will physically do can ever injure me.
6. there is something about the f word. and I don't mean any of the words you like to yell while you're ambling down the halls or skating down the street. this word: Forever- makes me want to hurl myself off a bridge. I wonder if you would stand there and try to talk me down like the one boy we saw who broke his bones. it was February sixth. It is April and I can't drive past there without wanting to mimick his very moves. maybe I pray for Forever so badly because you would never bless me with it. maybe its because sometimes I feel like my words are a foreign language and you only grow frustrated when I speak. maybe it's because loving you is mostly like sticking a loaded gun down my throat. I often slip into my fathers closet and pull his pistol from it's case just to remember how it feels. but you are far, far more dangerous
7. if you are hearing this you are sitting beside me, or beneath me, and you should know that you have saved me. when I found out you couldn't sleep in your own bed while I was gone (and how you could not write because music is too much like poetry) my brother told me, "good luck loving him as much as he loves you." what he doesn't know is how I can pick you out of a crowd of a thousand in just an instant. everyone asks me why I love you because they don't understand you. I don't understand you. that is why I love you.
8. I have read the minds of stupid boys with loud mouths and pretty smiles but your life is still just foggy windows that I cannot clear. I would love to hear you make promises but I don't think you can keep them. you were with me when you had two girls by your side- how could I ever know where your hands are now when I am not holding them? I would take a bullet for you but you're the one holding the gun. I always kiss you first. I always beg you to stay. but I am constantly so worried that you will slip away.