In all honesty, I've loved you since I first knew you.
I love you in the ways I don't know how to love
and in the places I don't know how to look for
I love you in the ways it hurts to communicate
and the places eyes are most powerful
and colors, the colors you paint behind you
and wings - I was searching, you showed me roots
and that growth stems from groundedness
and that circles are everywhere

I want to be in a circle with you
It's a sort of unformed dream, where I imagine
I might not need to be constantly moving

I love you just looking at you
eyes soft and
something hidden
we don't need to speak
I just want to kiss you

My wick is underneath the surface
trying to catch the flame

as the wall between me and the air shrinks,
the light glows deep
the sun penetrates me
the sea holds me here,
breath in my pocket,

and you are behind my eyes



I swear, I swear that I'm beautiful.
This time when I open myself
a thousand singing birds will
fly from me full force
I will be metal.
and rain.
and sea.
and storm.
and calm.
mostly, I will fall with the flowers
and be skin colored.

I will not need a kiss to be awakened
but I'm looking forward to our paths crossing,
wanderer
Your eyes eat the broken meadows
and glaze over, snow-dusted, in the mountains.

Fingers.
Of all things, I'm losing my fingers
One by one, skin patches struck by cold and beautiful music,
flaking off into the leaf piles
I want you to understand
If I had knees,
I'd be on them
Bent backwards and sideways
And that of all places,
I'd choose somewhere beautiful
that of all worlds to travel to the end of
And reach
today
where maybe the end  is around the corner, and
maybe everything has some deeper meaning,
And maybe underneath all the disagreements we're all just people looking for a home in each other -
I'd be here.
Fully.
I fought to be here.

Honey.
I want to call you terms of endearment.
Because the world is a child I want to hold and nurse to health.

I love with my chest - those things I bury inside myself, I want to transform into sunshine and spread outward. Cradle inside of me and let me hold you-
I love with my eyes if you'll look I won't look away. I'll try my best to see you wholly.
I love wholly. And I love
Delicately
With my fingers.

And I sing
And sprout wings in the spring
And grow, green
I'll pull you up with me.
Softly, I'll pull you in
With my sun-soaked fingers
To the sky.
Dry and rising
Higher than high-rises

For all the hate and spite and regret and everything that ever struck
the wrong chords and left dissonance reverberating behind it,
wherever the wave crested and crashed,
I will plant a flower.
Dig with my fingers into the earth,
I love you.

That's what I would paint you as.
Bold and bright red.
I think that's why you like them:
not because of the taste, but because they're the closest nature comes to telling your color
And I know you've got a thing or two against nature.

If I were Deaf I think it would be easier to look you and everyone else in the eyes.
I'd sign that I love you. And I'd sign a joke.
I'd say I'm proud of you,
and that you can do better.

I think you want to be that bright-red
confident
desirable
intense,
intimidating

want to be de
                       vo
                           ured

and secretly you dwell on that bitter-inside-of-your-seeds
that crunch, you imagine people might tire of returning to you

I just wish you knew that nobody doesn't eat pomegranates because of the seeds,
it's because they have to spend forever peeling away the outside just to get into the wonderful insides of it; they have to cut into that beautiful exterior hoping that the inside will be just as bright
and let's just say more people go for the red apple

I'd like to one day call you an apple
It has no secrets
and it is just as beautiful

I'm still stony from the storm.

Sitting cross-legged in the grass. Half of me is underwater.
Half of me sings praises to the sky.

Staring at empty hands:
all I need is air, world, here is my cup.
Offer my tears to the ground,
all I have is flesh and I'm sorry.

The familiar is translating into a shifted perspective,
mapped through my hazy half-watered views.
Questions bubble to the surface, they always do.
What is you? What is me?
Who are my companions, here?
Hands shrivel to a close, I am empty somewhere

so many of you: hiding your sorrows in the drink,
in the non-speak and waters-flowing-greening-the-path
of self-discovery-through-phase-denial;
pain for later,
pancakes for now.


I am so old,
my wrinkles are bared in the sun-exposed rock,
heart beating beside me, cup full of storm-water
and storm-blown watery eyes
dripping softly into the scenery
behind me

the world is infinity

next to that I am a pinprick that never fully bled nor healed

Look, I just want to be childish and sunshine
running through underpasses playing with paper planes
dragging you into the snow because
life is something to celebrate

A long time ago
I found myself there, with you
me being me
you being you
The cold night warmed my rusty insides
It wasn't so bad

But the world wasn't all that, love
We can't stay so sheltered forever
This last storm rocked a city cold-
colder than can be considered warm, I mean-
and while I want to read your words and remember your breath and bones
and fall into you I'd really just be
falling
nothing romanticized about it.
No one wants to leave all of their solid ground forever.
some of it, yes, but not all of it.

I've always been an all-or-nothing kind of person, in some ways
but life is about letting parts of yourself go
so you can grow
and I can grow

We're just two plants, you and I
not in the same pea pod, or even the same planter
but we both miss summer's glow and are jealous that our neighbors are sprouting flowers.

And at the end of it all, we'll both be fine.

The wind,
In your eyes,
That night.

That was the first time I saw true passion in a person.
The first time I thought about what it means to laugh while swimming upstream.

Nobody forgets moments like that.
Your eyes seared
forever in
mine.

Gently scattered cares
floated away to find another soul

And I stood bare holding a flame