You’d read Dickenson and glance over at my sketches in progress
Short quips about my tendency to bite my tongue as I worked
How I forget to censor the tines I mumble to myself

Are you still reading that same book?
Or have you finished it?
Placed it on your bookshelf
Next to your grandmother’s music box and jar of bottle caps?

I miss watching you read
I miss noticing you twist your hair around your fingers when the plot is stagnant
and furrow your brows when it isn’t

I had to draw your eyes because when I close mine they’re all I can see
I thought by letting them sleep between the warm pages of my notebook I could get some myself

At 3 am I scramble out of bed
Bathed in nightmares
I peek between the sheets
of pages to see if you’re still there
staring back up at me with those eyes that look like a symphony

I miss your hands
painted nails slamming a car hood down on a highway shoulder
finding brown wood fence to strike as you raise your voice
twisting my hair as you’re lost in thought
But refusing to wipe heartbreak dripping down my face
Calloused, which is why few have held them before
But you don’t believe me when I say
that to the touch
they feel like mother’s hands
Lover’s hands
Writer’s hands
hovering over a masterpiece before tearing it down, casting it among the other things that just happened to break as you held them
You were the type of child that said the vase jumped off of the cabinet you were climbing on
You were the type of child that said “My milk spilled itself”

An attitude that suggested you saw more than it seemed
and thought more than you spoke
because whenever you did speak
your words danced away from the masterpiece of you
dragging all attention to a clumsy, twirling bear
waltzing into a corner
into the cheap bright vegas lights of what everyone expected of you

And when you realized that all I expected was your eyes and your lips
you gave me your eyes
and lent me your lips

I want to depict the creation of Adam
Put myself in his place
But I can’t get God’s hand right,
His nails are painted and hands are calloused
yet soft as your voice
singing love songs to me through your breathing that
skips across my chest
like the cicadas singing to the night sky outside your window
Your hands appear in these crumpled drawings without fail
and I know it’s because I didn’t feel the touch of God until I held your hand,
saw beauty and boundlessness in your words,
heard the tinkling chimes of stars a billion years old through your fingertips on my face

Don’t let yourself think that I cannot see the face of God without you.
As I ask to which star I will owe tonight’s cicada symphonies
I simply miss holding your hands.

We stand,
toes knocking families of small rocks apart
feeling them tumble down cliff face of sure failure that lies ahead
Our chests beats loudly around our hearts
palms clench and unclench in anticipation
wishing to desperately search for handhold but instead remaining still
Gladiator with no weapon but his mind
that same mind that is fearfully aware of the impossibility of a victory
We are faint-hearted
We will die here today

The caverns in our ******* may tumble in upon themselves
but we push onward
headlong into the forces, amidst wind that seeks to push us back into our soft and still rocking cradles
No, we do not let the wind touch this broken flame

There is a certain power in standing naked under the scorching gaze of the ******.

So when your eyes refuse to close
in the face of whirlwind gusts of regret and imperfection
let tears stream backwards and across your face
let them settle into your ears
let them speak to you your fears so that you may agree and move ever onwards
let your clothes be rent and torn across the body that has carried you
across the years, through country and mountain range
through dark caverns of the moments where
your hands grasped for impossible hope
let them see your hands
that have built masterpiece
and broken masterpiece
let them see your chest
that has caved and cracked under the weight of misplaced sentiment
caved and cracked again under pounding contrition
heaved and drawn in reaching breath after reaching breath

Your outstretched palms may wish to search for any floating piece of garment
to clothe your impotent soul
to clothe angry, whimpering scars
the little smudges left on supple skin
No,
let them see every act of faith that God somehow evaded
every phone call left unreturned
every single talent left untouched
every moment of your heart dripping crimson guilt onto your feet
let them see every moment of bravery fallen short
every miscalculated heroic act,
let them hear the audience’s cynical laughter at
every failed attempt at beauty

because threaded into these strands of fabric
lying worn and broken
yet lying still, visible to any that wish to still point and cackle,

threaded into these strands of fabric
lies a history of what exists
and has existed
and will continue to exist in pure genuinity
there is no purer message than that same message
repeated by mockingbirds
as they commute across boundaries
relaying news of distant lands
with no perception as to what
Romeo and Juliet story they relay
what tales of awful and imperfect heartbreak
of tragedy not tragic enough for notice
but tragic yet the same

The world has yet to learn that every story is extraordinary
because time has taken the time to
pen it into it’s eternal library of existence
Record it with a seal and testament of reality
Time has given heed to the bleeding wound and painted a scar as a sign of what was not a dream
and those who prefer dreams to reality
forget that clocks don’t work in dreams

The universe is indifferent to the imaginary until
the moment words come crawling, unashamed, across tongue and out of mouth
into the open air to be swatted and beaten down or placed in glass
and it is in that moment
that
though we may die here today
the victory becomes ours.

It seems to me that your hands cannot find stable ground
they hover over soil,
not hard enough
they brush past rock
not fertile enough
they race past trees that aren’t high enough
but soar over cliff faces too dangerous to remain there for long
and your hands grow weary as they search
for a type of material with which they can make their dreams concrete

they are afraid to rest for too long
lest they forget the soft touch of grass
or the formidable strength of stone
they wish to remember all at once
While in their quest remembering nothing at all
to hold the earth in their fingerprints
to hold the earth and if not--
then nothing at all.

your hands have become weary, dear writer
let them rest
let them feel the mud between their soft nail beds
do not wash them. There is the world there, in your grasp.
You cannot let it go
even when the earth washes from the lines in your skin
it will leap back into your embrace through the air that you breathe
you were created to be its embodiment
so do not wander
you never have.

Not many will find absolute solace
beneath his truly marble stone
encased in
weather ridden
Chunks of ash
waiting for someone to pick it up and blow it into the wind

the stone shines when polished
and shines when thrown against the coral
it shatters what it contacts
and everyone blames the stone.

He stood during nights away from home
stood outside and petitioned strangers for a laugh
“I’m lonely” he says honestly
as they scurry past he sees pink
and sea foam blue
desiring to compress the color into statue.