Five steps or five thousand                                        
Her gait is just the same

Poets, painters
Can be tortured souls

But gardeners
Are at one with the world

No screens flash
No keyboard clicks

A woman she must prove her worth
Hood up, body bent
Her conversation polite

But minimal
Her gaze steadfast
Down to earth

Her gloved hands
Coaxing life from the bedraggled
Winter flower bed

You don't belong somewhere
Average.
You don't belong with someone
Ordinary.
And right now
Your life is grey and white
Not too dark and not too light
But I'm telling you, darling,
Don't let your life be newspaper clippings-
Born, Married, Died-
In cheap grey ink.
When you cut your ties and discover every color of your sunset
You won't have the patience for anything less than breathtaking.
I'm asking you not to have the fear
To settle for less anyhow.
I'm asking you to risk for you
To be selfish
To try the stormy seas instead of sitting in the harbor because
You are not a two car garage with a beige house attached
You're a castle, stained glass windows throwing rainbow cut outs of stars on all the floors.
You are not a November drizzle,
You're a summer hurricane.
Even if you never choose me
I'm begging you not to let your love be mediocre
Not to let your life be.
I'm asking you to go for what you deserve
Instead of what you fall into by accident.
You deserve the moon and the stars,
The sun and the planets.
You deserve the richest, loveliest of lives.
Please
Find your adventures, find your passion.
Just cause it's here
Doesn't mean it's good enough.
Don't let your life be newspaper clippings
In some old scrapbook under a bed.
Don't let yourself get caught in a practical, faded existence
Just because it seems like the safe thing to do.
You are not grey and white,
You are every spectrum, like a prism,
And it would be a crying shame
To let this life
Contain you.

I've been in love many times,
And if there's one thing I know, it's my heart.
(Some days I think that's the only thing I'm sure of.)
I know my heart.
And I know I seem to believe in things that stand little chance
And I know you don't want to see me hurting
And I know I have heard the same tired ******* warning
From everyone who loves me
But listen here,
I also know my heart.
And I'm telling you that it doesn't work any other way.
I'm telling you, dear, that if it wasn't you when we met
It won't ever be.
I'm telling you that it's not an option for me to just
Change my mind
And love somebody new just cause it's hard sometimes to be what I am.
You look at me like you're ready to see me crash and burn but
What you don't know, darling, is that I've done all that.
I've been there, where you think I'm off to,
And if I trip my way back to hell, I will claw my way out again.
You say you know the feeling
That you've learned, like you've been cured.
I think you quit.
You say you're like me
But I think you only
Used to be.
You wanna protect yourself, hold back, shut down?
That might work for you
But that's not how I work.
I don't care how many times you look at me loving her
Like you'd look at a train derailing,
I see it in your face, but
You don't know.
I've crashed and burned and suffered, and I'm back, and I will always
Come
Back.
And I know you'd rather I pick someone close, someone sure,
Maybe you.
It could be easy, it could be safe, it could be- No it couldn't.
It's not you.
And you better ask yourself before you push too hard-
Why would I ever take this kind of chance again
If I didn't know it was worth it?
I know my heart.
I know myself.
I know
I don't just turn things off.
I love someone? I'm in it for the long run.
And if it's you, it's you all the way.
And if it's not,
Nothing in the world can change that,
Even if I try my hardest.
You can tell me all day how it won't ever work out,
You can give me reasons to doubt and give up,
You can offer to be my Girl Friday and I might even accept,
But
Honey
One thing I know about myself is this:
You're not gonna get my heart
Unless it rips itself out of my chest and follows you home.

I don't know what I'm doing.
Your hands on me
Don't feel like fire
Or ice.
They feel like hands.
Your wanderings don't make me gasp
But they can make me sigh.
I wonder what she'd think if she knew.
I wonder if she'd care.
I don't tell her
In fear that she won't.
Your lips don't send lightning down my spine,
Or earthquakes through my stomach
But... they are warm
And I am lonely
And you said it was a game you played often.
All the same, I saw your eyes
I felt your fingertips-
They betrayed you,
And when I wrote you back "I'll talk to you tomorrow."
I wanted to add
"P.S. Don't love me."

I'm going to create for you
A hundred thousand stars
Stuck here on earth like pinned butterflies.
I'm going tear them free of their frames
And leave, in their absence, white spaces stamped on the age-yellowed wall
That's been just waiting for someone to break
All that prison glass.
I'm going to uncrucify those pure silver shimmering constellations
And send them shooting through the sky
And they will shatter everyone's heart who dares to glance up,
And even they will not express the exquisite joy of being unmade-
The ecstatic, mad exhilaration of the thought of you.
I am going to make you a constellation.
I am going to make you an angel.
No,
I am going to make you God
And Satan too.
I am going to make you everyone I've ever met
And everyone I've ever wished I could meet but didn't have the words
To pray for.

I am going to search for you
In every face I ever see
And anything I find there of you will strike a spark so dazzling it blinds.
And everywhere those people walk they will set fires
And all the tourist maps in their flimsy metal racks will burn with avenues and crossplaces of light
And the world over will be stretched across with searing cords that cut the paths you've touched
And everybody will know that their city streets are threaded through with hot silver because you
Looked at me.

I'm going to make you the exact moment
When the lightning hits the tree,
The only moment of its life that it truly feels,
And the last.

That devastating
And that perfect.

I am going to make you the white hot slow burn of desert sand in the bleaching sun
That purifying
And I am going to make you the sweet relief of rain seeping into the earth,
That vital.

I know what you are.
I know your limitations.

I strip you of them.

You've nowhere to hide.
I am going to make the thought of you into a living flame.
I am going to think of every second you have ever taken a breath-
Every
Single
One-
As a revolution
As a rising sun
As art.

I am going to love you with the same level of desire that every living thing has ever felt
For its continued existence.
And there is not
A **** thing you can do to stop me.