Lost in
lunar waves,
Tossed by
your embrace…

A celestial
twinkle
of memory
lives on
indefinitely…

I’ve had you
in passing glances
and in soul-holding
stares…

I’ve had you with
ice cream
with three stuffed bears…

I’ve had you in
sweltering summer,
in lentil soup fall…

I’ve had you without
ever having had you
at all.

My dad taught me
that placement in society
is ultimately irrelevant.
He taught me you can find
your eager slice of happy
anywhere, not just in between
four familiar walls.
I used to think
that if only he had access
to a mattress and a ceiling
he'd find his happiness.
But, I realized -
Who am I
to dictate what makes
another feel complete?
Here, by the park benches,
His heart blooms like
a grandmother's rose bush.
He lives moment to moment.
Cares not for possessions,
Has no schedule,
No place to be.
Has no bills, no debts,
no credit, no ID.
Scrounges the ground
and kind strangers' gestures
for everything he owns.
But oh, his cold, tired bones!
I worry how long a journey lasts
for a lone vagabond.
Envigorated by the sounds
of the sea
and chance encounters
whether they be familiar
friends or family
or the palpable presence
of all that's imaginary.
It all lurches to him
in a grand symphonic dance,
Linking his hours to days,
and days to weeks,
extending outward and upward
to take the heavens
in his grasp.
A pigeon dove lands
on his tattooed finger.
He laughs, and it flocks
to another's perch.
A tree branch this time.
The animals and children
look into his eyes
and wonder about the stranger.
Alone, raggedy, down on luck
but up in spirits,
and they recognize
a body brimming with
presence.
My dad taught me you can be
nobody and still have everything.

I’ll bloom in spring
Alongside the Californian hills.
When the rain paints
The terrain green
With speckled white wildflowers,
I’ll tiptoe on sunlight
to touch the sky.
I’ll be the brightest star
They’ve yet to discover.
Shooting, shining, falling,
And wished upon.
Dry land, crispy and brown
Underneath my feet on
A winter night.

I’ve never felt
More luxurious
Than when
I was on a newly
Prescribed drug
With a total body high,
Coming down from mania,
Still exuberant,
But in a private space,
In my bathroom
In the ward,
In a bathtub
That does not fill up.
So I put on the shower
And I let the water hit my skin
And I took bite after bite
Of crisp and juicy apple slices.
I was at the mental hospital
Marilyn Monroe stayed in.
I imagined her here in the same bath
Also feeling luxurious and all sorts
Of ****** up like me.

I chose you
Like the butterfly
Chose the sun.
Like the moth is
Nocturnally drawn
To the moon
And any other
Illuminated illusion.
Frenetically chasing
In a trance-like dance,
We wade through
Day and night
Like winged creatures.
Expressive messengers,
Speaking a language
In metaphor
Available to all
Who can hear
Symbols and scriptures
Written by an architect
Keen enough on details
To give day and night
Its doting darlings.

You stir my cold embers just right.
Warmth crackles through that is bound to ignite.
You stir me from stiff slumber’s grasp.
Arising like Phoenix, adorning black mask.
Concealed from view, hidden black goddess.
Awaiting arrival, slow burning embers in darkness.

The double slit experiment
In quantum mechanics
Shows us one thing:
That you can’t trust a *******.

You can’t even trust a particle
Without watching it like a hawk,
And even then it will disobey you.

Be a little rebel,
Get yourself a little *****,
Have your own opinions,
Let relationships decay into ruin.

Quantum mechanics tells me
That we’re all a little cunty,
Even the atoms that comprise us,
So what choice do we have
In the end?

All these poems
We write
To save our lives.

To preserve like amber,
Only more futile.

To hope and pray our children
May live on and bless
What’s left of mankind.

May move them with their liveness,
Their boldness, their plain old truth.
Even if all they ever did was express
How they really felt to be alive.

Under the Babylonian sea
Lives a place hid from you and me
And in this place, broken in two in the sand,
Known as a fault line cursing the land,
Is the place where we return again.

You and me, citizens of the earth - we’re people from the center of
The earth
And we search out to the stars
To try and find our birth.
All while the truth lies under our feet.
But don’t ask me.
This is the mystery you see.
The mystery of me.

Not to make the story all revolve around me,
But I lived for lifetimes as nature’s pulse,
A most high pixie maintaining the roses,
All the little vines and terraces,
And I was whimsical and wise
And greatly cherished.
I lived to be about a thousand years,
And died of self-sacrifice
In 2005.
As our planet grew more and more technical,
Avoiding the organic, skeptical,
It was for a simple reason:
The present goes in two directions.
The present goes forward and
The present goes backward.
And somewhere in between
We have our fate,
Our choices.
Free will drives this place.
Don’t think too much of gravity
Or relativity.
Free will is the ingredient in this Universe
Holding it all together.

So the extraterrestrials that guard this planet,
They guard like a gourd
Rotting on a hot Saturday.
They guard like a hound
Pitched on a chain
To its little box of a house.
They guard like an abusive stepfather.
Like they are the way.
And I know them.
They killed all the mermaids,
When I reigned as Queen.
That is for another tale,
Or tail?
I forget what sort of humor is
Current at this age,
But puns are a sign of great wit,
So with them, I’ll spit.

I reigned as Queen of the Mermaid people and indeed all of the people. I reigned when there were humanoids
Similar to you, but stouter.
It was before your race mated with
My race.
We raced
Towards death.
You captured my people with the utmost brutality.
I see it done to my cousins,
The porpoises and whales,
And it hurts me
To see it happen again.
You stab these creatures in their blowholes,
Just like you stabbed my sisters
And eventually, me,
In our wombs.
The pregnant ones howled the loudest.
You brutally desecrated my people.
You did it again on the land
To the people we were most connected to,
The original tribes of North America.
And not that it’s you, people of the land.
I am one of you.
That will not change in this lifetime.
As Earth Mother for a thousand years
I obtained the Earthly information,
The muscle memory
Of the plants.

We call it a planet
And terra,
Like Mother Earth is a plant.
We see her as affectionate
And beautiful,
But some has seen her wrath.
She shakes,
She fears the madness
That lives on her skin,
And burrows into her,
Deeper and deeper,
Searching for her heart.
But I, as Queen fairy,
Took the honor
Of self-sacrifice
And took her heart
And hid it
In an average baby girl.
Will she realize her goddess heritage?
Wiped her mind and by-passed the sacred
Earth Mother heart.

Baby girl grows up in Babylon.
The chances of her
Freeing her Beast
Are as low as it goes.
Half of the pixies wept
Half of the pixies cheered.
Then they chose sides
And the positions, they veered.

The more you look around
The more you realize
Every day people are doing
Everyday things,
Things they don’t really want to do,
But must, to get ahead, to stay afloat,
To not get knocked down.
But the more you look around,
You see the hurt, you see the failure,
You see it imminent within you, too.
You resist and you pull away, and you
Tell yourself that you are different,
You will lead a different life and have success.
But the more you look around,
The bleaker it gets.
Sometimes life is better with the blinders on.

I wanted to be a painting,
A goddess.
I wanted to be all Aphrodite,
Body and curves.
I didn’t want Athena’s leadership,
I wanted the power of seduction.
I wanted to be a muse,
Amused by the spellbound stares.
I wanted to be a mare,
Bred into beauty and totality and grace.
I wanted to be nothing less than art.
So the gods blessed me with such
Voluptuous hips and curves.
But I do not want to look like
Renaissance art,
I want to be a contemporary model.
Thin and toned with golden glow.
So now the gods shake their heads
And wonder why they put so much hope,
So much effort, so much and so little
Into me.

Bodies have a language of their own,
And yours speaks in tongues,
The way you keep me close,
Sharing in worship,
Warding off negative spirits
With a hypnotic kiss.
We bring the wicked sprites
And interdimensional entities
Out to a playground feast
When we intertwine, at least,
That’s what I imagine, in ecstasy,
And yet, they have no power over us,
Because of the clever way we are ******
Into these upper worlds that surround,
Cradling me, craving me, faint, mewing sounds -
This is the world that fate would have found.

Right in the center
Between my brows
The third ajna eye
Calls out to the crowd
Consciously choosing
Who to meet
Consciously moving
The world ‘neath my feet
Consistently bruising
Ego’s covering,
Shell so battered
It’s nearly shattered.
Hovering like those
Sacred birds
Iridescent wings
In my dreams
Answering to nature’s
Haunting calls
Answering to future
And destiny’s pulls.

We stop our faithful car
Halfway between both
National parks
Because the scenery
Was too gorgeous
To quickly forget.
We sit down near a cow fence
And you pick me a flower
And place it in my hair,
And I can tell everything
With you is about the scenery,
The message, the emotion.
You’re an artist that never
Turns away from the canvas.
You never turn off the appreciation,
The evaluating, the creating,
And I want to kiss your
Tired eyes,
The ones that must dream
Exhausting things
All night and day,
And now there are tears in my eyes
And they sting
And it’s because I realize
How draining it must be
To be so beautiful.
You make me realize
How similar we are,
I see myself in you.
Everything to me is poetry.
All the double meaning
And metaphor
Gives me context, gives me life,
Helps me make connections.
It drives me absolutely insane,
Being an artist at heart,
And then in a twist of fate,
That turns out to be
Exactly what you want.
Now we’re weeping
On the side of the road
Somewhere in Idaho,
And you love me,
And I know it,
And it hits me hard for the first time,
And I’m an artist
So I want to feel it all.
And we talk about love
And our fears about death,
How we’ll always be artists -
Me, the mad one, and you,
The sad one, and we laugh,
With tears of every emotion,
And we want to drink them up,
And it’s like time doesn’t exist
On this abandoned highway road
With the unforgettable view,
The unforgettable me,
And the unforgettable you.

I don’t want to start this poem out with uncertainty,
But it’s instinctive, you see, and I’m not sure why I’m here.
You ever feel like that?
Returning to the same places, the same people,
Half of them passively accepted, not chosen.
That’s what I feel sometimes when I traverse across a page
With a cursor and impulsive fingers racing across the keyboard.
I’m just a traveler and yeah, I guess there’s glimpses of destinations,
But I don’t have a map.
All I have are my past footsteps.
Collecting pages in the breeze, greedily grasping.
Yeah, there’s no getting off this ship.
This is a place I must return to,
Like a mother’s grave.
I tread lightly, with dignity, knowing there’s purpose
In me arriving and visiting, but sometimes not finding the words to say,
And my throat dries up like a bird’s nest.
At least my fingers are active, they dance.
I come to visit this sacred place, so that when I do visit
The inevitable gravesite with daisies in hand,
I can leave a piece of me that’s a little more permanent,
A little more solidified, love in a glass bottle.
I might not get off this ship, I might very well be stuck in that bottle.
A treasure tossed in the rolling ocean,
Lost in a sea of oblivion.
The waves continue on in their cosmic, rhythmic dance,
Until they, too, forget their purpose.
Until that day, they dance.
Like the planets in their certain spirals.
The world will dance, meaningless, absurd,
Unquestioningly.
Dance how you see fit.

I don’t want to write
Like anyone else.
I want to fit into my words
Like my fingers fit
Interlaced through his,
Made for each other
By some strange design,
Some string of code,
Some higher power,
Something, somewhere,
I cannot control
And I cannot see
And I do not think about,
It just fits and it fits right.

We stitched a patch together
On my flesh in the shape
Of a cartoon heart.
I would have your heart,
But only a caricature of it.

I’d approach you the first year
As much as you’d approach me.
In that year, you’d stitch me more,
Kissing and caressing me with your
Passionate gift of language.
I asked you to make my stitches
Tighter and more numerous
With your luminous promise of love.

The second year went on like the first.
Less dialogue acquainted me with
Thinking of you like clockwork, like records,
Your sickly, gangrene patch
With familiar stitches from your own hands
Attached to the flesh on my arm,
Reminding me you were there.

On the third year, I drove through the seasons
On a tank of memories I called love.
I sought to find you but my tank was empty,
I walked and took a train, then walked some more,
Towards your hopeless direction,
Only to fall upon my face and become a bust,
Like a watermelon hitting cement.

As time ticked on, I’d say words here and there,
As yours grew fewer and fewer.
I grew used to your ghosts,
Gave them all names.
It’s only just now that I realize what’s been done.
It’s hard for me to come down and sit in this
Cold room with cold ghosts.

It’s only from this moment
That I’ve begun unraveling
All these threads.
I’m not sure what my skin
Looks like underneath.
I undo what’s been fastened to me
Day by day and wince in pain.
So this is what it’s like to breathe.

Caressing the void
With honeyed fingertips
So that when it
Swallows me whole
It does so gently.

What do I have at my disposal?
A knack for always wanting to write
My intuitive messages down.
But it’s got no substance,
It’s got no meat.
I’m all bread and cheese and
Condiment without any meat.
It’s fitting for a vegan, I suppose,
But not for a poet.
The poet has to lead breadcrumbs
For the reader in order to get to the meat
Of the poem, the substance, the protein.
Where is it?
I’m lacking substance where I have all these
Nice little toppings and sauces and vegetables,
I have a dipping sauce for this sandwich,
But no meat!
I have to go to the store,
I have to keep honing my skill.
I have to develop a hunger for meat.

To meet one who you’ve only known
In passing glances
And to fall in love
With reckless abandon.

Once you fall in love with
An artist, an empath,
A writer, a musician,
A feeler, a healer,
A giver, a lover,
There is no going back
To an ordinary life.

Posthumously Famous.

That is definitely the name
Of my book.
If not that, a title for this poem.
No, the first line.
It’s untitled.
I won’t restrict myself.
I won’t be led astray.

Poets are just looking for an outlet.
Poets are in anguish.
Poets are on fire.

Let us burn.
Let us burn in agony.
Do not peek your head over,
Dear reader.
You have an obligation.
Work, kids, bills.
Don’t think of us.
We are burning in agony, in fire,
And we do not wither away.
We cannot escape that easily.

Nothing worth reporting besides the usual
Importance of ignoring negligent thoughts
That seek to destroy me,
Harboring inside me,
A caged bird with a broken wing.
Hope calls out in many ways,
Still your surroundings to hear its bays.
Quiet. Listen.
It’s seeking you in earnest,
Its mysterious hands fiddling with
The lock of your entrapment.
Soon, you will have the strength
To pursue all of your dreams.
But right now, you’re too consumed
By the hopelessness of your confinement.
The bars disappear when you look at them
A certain way. Illusory, these posts, these chains.
Break free, some sympathy may come your way,
And unleash you, teach you how to fly with your handicaps.
Don’t look back, once you’re released -
Fly over the valleys and the rivers, wherever you please.
Fly brave, fly free.
Continue to seek
All that seems out of your reach.
Bathe in the waterfalls of your fortune.
It’s yours, after all.
You have this as your guiding motion.
Snap back to your present situation.
You see the cage, you feel your stuntedness,
Your loss from grace,
From freedom, the chase,
You so earnestly thought you’d finally taste.
One day, it’s yours.
Just hold on to hope, on to your scope,
The sights and the breeze under your wings,
It’s all yours, always has been, always will,
And still, I know it stings.
Listen to the way the ocean sings,
Once you make it there, I know you will,
But for now, let the ink spill and spell
Your own misfortune, your own destruction,
Slowly deteriorating any sense of fruition.
I know you want to give up on these ghosts,
But they are yours to catch with a gilded net,
So let them go, if you choose, but remember
You’ll have to live with regret that you never pursued
Beyond the bars that immobilize you, like roots.
You were meant to travel and traverse,
The universe will push you towards your path.
Do not listen to those who jeer and laugh.
You know your purpose. Listen, it’s there.
What your inner voice guides is your truth to bear.

The musicality of the moment,
Brought by the way my tongue
Flicks against my palate with
A satisfying smack like bubblegum tricks
Is a greater bliss than the pauses
Between a Mozart piece
Where the essence of the music lies.
The peace, the stillness, the absorption
Of higher vibrational photons and forests
Of enchantment, reading manuscripts,
Prescription bottles, poetry, philosophy,
Thirsty to fill a void grey and dull,
Coloring my world with the sound of language.
Finding new ways to contort and contemplate
Writing and meaning and verse.
Channeling insights from the universe.

I feel pretty and soft,
Like a jasmine flower
Blooming with fragrant power,
Feminine and unique,
No two alike in pale white and pink,
Harnessing, absorbing
Sweet summer light,
The rich scent of jasmine
Carried aright,
Weightless and pungent,
Expressively existing.
I feel pretty and soft,
My presence caressing and kissing.

The key to new destinations
Is nowhere in sight.
I must forage for that which will fulfill.
And I do not know where my efforts will lead,
Or if they will pay off in any good time.
I know none of this, but I do not stop.
We play in the nighttime like nightingales,
Soaring around, whispering secrets the moon keeps,
Tapping into a frequency we cannot permeate just yet,
Nibbling at the edges, trying to loosen the threads,
Improving with persistence on our art,
Building a nest with patient diligence,
A quaint lifestyle in the glow of the stars.
Some days I see you looking at them and wondering
Why you can’t be among your own,
Why you can’t have your own orbit,
You deserve it,
But I don’t.
I’m far too cynical to be powered on dreams.
That’s why my humble spirit must stay in the lowlands,
And why, if you love me, you sacrifice angelic realms
And must continue working in the branches,
Neglected nightingales.

It’s not enough to love you,
I want to inhale you,
Breathe you,
Feel you between
The chambers of my heart,
Your sweet oxygen
Materializing
Into totalizing
Oblivion,
Mingling
Bodies and blood,
Spirit confounded,
Compounded
Into this unitary union.
Fruition found
My bones, bounded
To this body and earth,
Rhythmically versed,
Your gentle breathing,
Keep him with me
By becoming in tune
With spirit, body,
I swoon.

Scraggly,
In face and heart
Staggering
By the harbor,
A celebratory place
For families to flock
And sight-see the city
By the ships and the docks.
While the sea gulls fight
Over scrimpy scraps,
A lone man traverses,
Seized by mind traps.
Disoriented by the shadows
Of his past,
Taunting and tampering
With his freedom, at last,
He's broken his vow of silence
He promised he could pass.
Reality so far removed
From his ruminations.
Passerby's passively wonder
What attracted him to the concrete.
Overactive imagination
Is an answer I'd repeat.
Occasionally another may marvel,
Where is his family?
Waiting in vain,
In the background,
In the rain,
Devoid of way to entertain
The possibility to take the reigns
Away from his deceptive beast
That guides his woeful way,
Fighting for fistfuls of his feast -
A price he has to pay
For having an untreated illness.
Now I have no say
In pillows or cement.
He chose the latter.
Now all I can do is feel lament.
If you see my father,
You may see kindness in his eyes,
A mind that's rapidly firing,
Comforting words to himself he's ironing.
If you see my father -
You may see him time and again,
You may see him in the sea gull,
Harmlessly scavenging,
Heartily conversing,
Heartbreakingly existing -
If you see my father,
Let him exist
However he chooses.
I have no choice
But to do the same.

If you don’t write it,
It won’t come.
That spark of madness
Devoid of need for the tongue.
If you don’t write it,
It won’t come.
That hidden power in your tone
To bring you visions into the world,
A form of alchemy that pales to none.
If you don’t write it,
It won’t come.
That jewel in your belly that glows brightly
That seeks to find you day and nightly.
If you don’t write it,
It won’t come.
The spark that you find,
The visions you define,
The power you cannot hide.
If you write it,
It will come.

I watch him slowly deteriorate.
The first man I ever loved
Is being brought down,
Like a torrid helicopter
Caught in a hailstorm.
How much he must struggle
Against the current,
Only to be swept into unsightly circumstances,
Into a misfortunate gravity
He brings upon himself.
Homelessness, his vice,
And all I can do to help him
Is not worry so much
About all his suffering and whirlwind adventures
That make so little sense.
The delusions, the psychosis,
The wretched, wonderful mania,
It’s all so much for one person to contain,
And all I can do is watch
Him deteriorate
Before my eyes.
The first man I ever loved,
Fearful of none,
How terrible must be the parts of him
I cannot see
For his actions to be
So extreme.

The Word was written,
But my word is spoken
In the silence of the sacred,
In the crash of the ocean.

The Word was written,
But still I fumble
With what to think
To remain humble.

The Word was written,
But how does Nature sing!
And how pretty the lilacs dance
And how awesome bubbles the spring.

The Word was written,
But my mind questions,
Scourges the earth for answers,
Philosopher is my essence.

The Word was written,
But how it nods
To the doubt in me
That there are such gods.

The best I can achieve
To loving you
Again
Is a half-hearted glance
At your heart.
The beating, ****** *****
So pompous in its origin
To feel the twinges of desire
And the throat, so clear
And so precise
To tell me how
You’d think I’d be perfectly wonderful
And nice.
And did I prove you wrong?
Or did I do anything at all
To express my adoration,
Besides tell you pretty silvery things,
Word soup on a platter,
And cutting fierce glances
Across an otherwise empty room?
Did I do anything
To prove love
Even to myself?
Besides take a train
To LA,
To find, of all things,
An ugly field
Where I knew I would meet myself
In disarray?
Did I do anything
Ever
To surpass spirit and *****
Or am I just going
To be the one
That always wanted you
In darkness and in light?
Did I do anything but dream
The whole unending,
Maddening
Night?

The heart of mine
Sings a tune
That does not need
To rhyme with moon.
The heart of mine
Does not need
Language at all,
To make its point a heed.
It says what it wants,
It does as it wills,
And I let it play
Like a child, unstill.
I let it rupture
Its voluptuous rant
About how it’s ignored
Or let it signal its chant.
I let it pout
I let it shout,
And do I ever
Let it all out.
I listen to its sage advice,
And let it counsel,
Its rhythm suffice.
It has a way
Of saying the right things
By saying nothing,
But still it sings.
My heart does a dance
Whether I want it or not,
But I have lived in a cage,
Why should my heart be fought?
And pummeled down
Like all of the rest,
To be less than free,
To be less than best?
I let it live its life,
I let it chant its tune,
And boy does it ever
Rhyme poems with “moon.”

To find myself
In Hell’s grips
From loving you
So tightly,
Is a paradox
So sweetly bitter
I can’t help but to
Smile weakly.

Have I left you all dry,
With a throat I’ve supplied
With the words of a poet
Who slips a poem inside.
Receiving your mail,
You handsome, dark male,
You sat in a chair
With woozy head as you stare.
Painting her body, prepared,
For you to meet her and share.
The words of her letter,
Forms the pierce of her stare,
Her full body in view,
She arches her back up for you.
Pulls up her long, cascading hair.
Moves to her rhythm,
You watch her, ensnared.
With her own ink she’s shared,
Dancing for you with words placed with care.
Your body feels weak, your head feels so light,
The pumping of blood supplies you with
Your want for the night.
You stare at her words, in the shape of her curves,
Her lips parting in pleasure, her eyes shooting arrows,
You study every seductive trace of a dot,
Coming to life in every detail she’s got,
She’s sent herself to you, you can smell her perfume,
Sprawled out on your page, she beckons to you.

You have me
Like a clock that never stops,
Like the wind’s song,
Like the leaves dancing,
Like the stars’ sparkle
All night long,
You, you have me,
Like shivering in winter,
Keeping the goosebumps from dimpling,
Fine lines on skin, a dimple poking through.
Keep me longer,
Under your aching conditions,
I want to feel the fiery, icy burn,
You’re elemental, you’re nature,
You’re primal.
Oh you, you have me,
Like forests whispering, beckoning,
The unknown I can plunge into,
Deep waters,
Surrounding me, drowning me,
But this time, I can breathe.
You have me, you always have me,
Take me, have me again,
Like nature gives, and trees begin,
Deeper roots than we’ll ever see,
Like you and oh, what you do to me.

Lost with you at midnight,
Crickets chirp melodic tune.
Melted snowflake puddle
Like hottest time at noon.
My soul has sparked and flamed,
All reason lost in wake.
Fire so untamed,
Undeniable, endless ache.
Caressing cherry kisses,
Like cherry blossom trails,
Dancing on a rhythm,
Our quickening pulse unveils.
Tasting up your scent,
Nostalgic like the rain.
Wrapping me in comfort,
Darkness not in vain,
Nourish, quench my wanting,
Like water in the sun.
Butterflies surround us,
Passion not unsung,
All of nature ushering
Our hearts to rush in tune,
All love shared here ensues
Under conspiring moon.

When you love life itself,
The very act of sitting passively
Contains feelings of contentment.
Harbor love by abstaining from harm.
Refuse to defuse pain.
Leave pleasure as a passive gain.
Rejoice that you can remark,
"I have lived";
That is a truth
The mystery of Consciousness gives.
When the blood and the lungs
Pump and respire
With a warmth in your heart
That sings like a choir -
When the silent moment is sweet,
Light and complete,
How much more can you be,
How much more can you seek?
You are already Love
Every moment you breathe.
You are Love on a journey
To manifest dreams.
You are already a dream
Within a dream.
Now experience fully
However your story proceeds.

I've found myself on the razor's edge,
Like a figure skater.
I skate through life,
Avoiding hazards with grace,
Holding my head up high,
And spinning out of control
Once in a while,
Only to collect myself
In poised determination
And a flick of the wrist,
Brushing the worries away.

Whittle me down to the bone.
I've been carrying onto so many things.
Expose my shelter, like stone.
Scattering light to find what truth brings.

Bury me 'til I'm nothing.
Ground me into dust.
Take me to the edge of the world,
Where our jewels and our money are bust.

Take me into the corner
Of captivity's gilded world.
And watch as I rebuild myself,
Let my higher realms unfurl.

She spoke of swallowtail butterflies
In her native tongue,
Floating and drifting
To each new idea unsung.
But like a hummingbird
Caught in a net,
She was told to put
Her ideas to rest.

I was raised by a mentally ill father.
Because there is comfort in numbers,
I, too, was afflicted by a similar disorder.
It’s difficult to separate the person from the sickness,
Sometimes impossible.
Sometimes we become the shadowy monster,
Embrace it with wilted roses,
Knowing too well that of everything else,
The disorder will still be there,
Waiting.
My shadow has been dormant.
My father’s is still active,
Seeking.
Sometimes when we meet it’s like a perfect storm,
A tornado of comfort.
Someone understands the climate.
I take my father’s hand encouragingly,
He turns to run, squirrely,
The shadow greets me with open arms.
I love the shadow as much as I love the man.
After all, there is comfort in numbers.