I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy fighting in my own.
You make sacrifices
That aren’t yours to make,
A heavy bill you don’t foot.  
there are white roses that have grown
In a field you turned into a battle ground,
They are red now,
Stained by blood that is not your own.
And it drips onto the grass,
Into the soil,
and from the soil,
Into me.
Into all of us.
Into you, but you don’t know that.
I’ve been growing white roses lately,
That’s my war.
And they grow towards the sky,
Despite the fact they sprout
From the rubble you’ve left behind.
And unlike you I don’t pick their petals.
Their thorns don’t scare me because
They belong to them, not me.
They don’t mean to harm you,
They are just protecting themselves from you.
Though certainly
You have been harmed by others.  
A bullet.
A bomb.
A bombardment.
A breath of fire.
A bulletin board of things
That don’t need to happen.
I come to find it’s better
not to point the finger at white roses
Or their thorns.
Or myself.
This one falls on you.
So no,
I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy.
I’m just way too ******* busy,
Fighting my own.

If I were a card in the deck,
I don’t know what one I’d be.
And I don’t know of those cards,
Which ones sit in my back pocket.
I’m not sure I’m any of them,
And I don’t think any of the 52
Were made for me.
A card feels like a weapon,
I can’t help but wonder
If weapons were initially made to hurt others,
Or to protect ourselves from them.
But it seems for most of us,
We play a lot of
Aces against ourselves.
And in the face of seconds,
We understand very little.
Like how many seconds it took
To make a bouquet,
A bridge,
A bomb,
A person,
A picture of people,
Of me,
Of her,
Of you.
I question how many more seconds,
This glass will have champagne in it.
Well, it’s Prosecco, actually.
The seconds don’t care if it came from
California or France,
And apparently tonight I could give a ****.
That glass is my one companion,
This cold evening on Lincoln street.
It plays no cards against me.
We decided, very mutually,
to put down our weapons for a night.
Or for at least a second.
Just so we could shuffle the deck.

And as I lie next to her I feel as though I’m falling
From the stars down to an earth I don’t recognize
At a speed faster than terminal velocity.
I don’t know if I can’t sleep or don’t want to,
The lights of the skyscrapers ooze through
The bedroom window
And cover her anatomy
Like the dusting of the first snow
On new dahlia,
Earlier than it came last year,
Or the year before,
Or any year I can remember.
She need not dream about me,
So long as she awakens to me.
Her chest rises and falls,
My body throbs in waves of merciful tepidity
And colors drip into her dreaming mind.
I don’t feel scared.
For the first time I’d rather sit than run.
I listen to her with my eyes.
I see her in split seconds when I blink.
There are people who don’t know each other who want to go to war.
We don’t know each other, but maybe we could end one.

There’s a battle
That they don’t see
Between the david and Goliath
Within me
Some mornings my feet drag
More than they skip,
I skip breakfast
Because it doesn’t make me
Less hungry
And courage is fragile at times
Because it’s most often the sister of fear,
I want to be the way she moves,
Slow motion,
When water is white,
But also the river when it feels still.
I still feel,
And David loads his sling,
David got me this far,
I believe in him more than god.
Do you?

What if the lion was scared?
What if what goes up didn’t come down.
What if I placed a bet,
Somehow, against my garden.
What if i stopped looking,
What might I not find?
I know they didn’t build skyscrapers
To get closer to heaven.
What if the moon was no closer.
What if I could barely acknowledge,
The force it takes
For a blade of grass to grow.
And somewhere along a horizon I’ll never meet,
Lies the exploding of a star,
I named after you.

I’m waiting,
And not too desperately,
Until something is enough.
I desire,
Just as the moon moves tides,
Predictably,
Always on schedule.
The glass slipper I keep in my back pocket,
Grows cold, and I wonder if a different material might fit an idea more comfortably.
To say goodbye so many times,
Does not take anything from hello.
I’ve heard the core of the earth is very hot,
And that makes the most sense to me.
Somewhere beneath it all something burns,
And I want to know what it has to say.

She told me,
“I want to be close.”
I replied,
“It’s lovely to sit by a fire,
less lovely to be in one.”