Hi.
Can I just say that you’re beautiful?
I can’t see you.
I can’t hear you.
I don’t know if you can sing like an angel or are as off key as a drunkard on Christmas.
I don’t know if you’re porcelain pale or have laugh lines and freckles on your cheeks.
This isn’t a pick-up line.
There’s no punchline cause there’s no joke.
Just me.
Ordinary, imperfect, me, telling you that you’re beautiful.
It needed to be said.
It needed to be said because I’m one thousand percent sure that you’ve never said it to yourself.
I’m one thousand percent sure that you’ve never looked in a mirror and loved every single little part of you.
I’m pretty sure that you’ve looked into a mirror and said ‘Heck yeah, I’m lookin’ fiiine today’
But fine is…well…fine.
It’s not beautiful.
And today means today.
Not every day.
So, hi.
I don’t know your name.
I don’t know where you’re from or where you’re going.
I don’t know the color of your skin or the pigment of your dreams or who you love with an infinity that burrows itself into the very tip of your bones.
Quite frankly, I don’t need to.
Some cultures have a tradition of naming people for their personality. I don’t know you, but I’m sure you’re a thousand scribbles of a pencil knotted in lovely uncoordinated whorls that paint themselves into a smile.
I don’t know those scribbles
So, for now, you are Beautiful.
Beautiful, and I don’t care whether you think that’s a cotton candy sweet cliche or not, Beautiful your name is every single piece of you that locks together with puzzle pieces that only fit you, Beautiful, you are highs and lows and tears and laughter, a soul that soaks up warmth like it’s sunlight and huddles away from the cold by blowing on sparks of imagination.
Beautiful is the name that spreads your heart out until it fills your chest, pushing against your breastbone until it feels like there’s an ache, right there, from pure joy.
Beauty is not perfect.
Perfect is cold, so very very cold.
Beautiful, you are not perfect.
That does not mean you are not Beautiful.
You are every single facet of your mind, body, and soul, mirroring off each other in endless harmony, sharp love and soft frustration, pushing billions of molecules aside every second with just a tap of your finger.
Aren’t you extraordinary?
Call yourself Beautiful, call yourself by your name, say it as softly as you need to, as loud as you can bear it, let it fill you, take you in, take every part of your beautiful self in. You don’t have to smile if you don’t need to, but let sink into your muscles and your blood, let it blink out of the tips of your fingers.
You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t have do be perfect. You just don’t have to.
Because beautiful is not trying.
Beautiful is just being you.

From the one who needed to hear it most,

Hey beautiful.

The Earth
is one big ball of twine
Every person has a piece of string lacing up their leg, like ballet slippers that you can walk on
You don’t dance through life on pedestrian slippers
There’s no form of tap, jazz, or hip-hop that’ll keep you from knotting your threads with mine
So as you sit in a cafe in Paris
sipping limonade and watching the river of people on the Champs-Elysees
You’ll pretend you don’t feel a tug on your ankle
from that the little fille in Hong Kong who got an A on her test
the teenager kneeling down to rest a rose on the cross with a Jewish étoile
the old man letting out the sail as his bow skims la ocean
As you stand up from the cafe table let yourself be pulled into a dance
People these days
abuelo says
like people are spit off the tip of his tongue
People these days
always rushing to a place they don’t have to get to yet
Back in my day
in my dia
everything
was
just
slow
Back in your day abuelo
Back in your day
there weren’t seven billion people that had dance slippers made of twine
there weren’t so many playing cat’s cradle with their feet
People rush because they do have somewhere to go
Somewhere to be
obviously, that somewhere to be is not where they’re rushing to
obviously, they wouldn’t go where they’re being pulled
obviously, abuelo

So my abuelo can tap his feet to seven billion cats‘s cradles
As you scrape your feet along french pavestones in Paris
And the twine will knot and twist and make all of us dance
to the beat of the world instead of the beat of sound
because music is made using hands, not feet
and under your feet
there’ll be a ring ring ring
from an Earth made of twine
the best sort of telephones
were always the ones made of Campbell’s soup and string
and as the world goes to voicemail
you might tap answer with your feet
say a prayer-
miss you, please-
I’m sorry, I didn’t-
There’s no way-
What? I can’t-
On that off sort of chance
You pressed answer
and all the messages come flooding in
Pressing answer is like cutting a wire
the electricity sparks and freezes
the caller is stuck
Your answer is like trying to speak over a jet engine to someone underwater
Silence is the loudest muffler for anyone who
Doesn’t want to hear it-
You just don’t understand-
I can’t believe you!-
Wrong, you’re wrong-
Someone else hears a ring from their soup-can-and-twine
You let your’s drop down and tangle with ballet shoes made for walking

Humans are alive for one hundred years
People only live for eighty or so
From when you were a little baby, you’ve felt the beat of a thousand hearts
The breath of a thousand dreams
The spark of a thousand smiles
Through the ribbons of twine that wound up your ankles
But the older you get
The more you fray
And it shows in bruised eyes, callused fingers, wintered hair
That you’ve been walking for as many days as the earth is wide
Collected enough footprints to feed a soul on stories
And when you die
mourir
pethaíno̱
umierać
Death cuts your string with his blunt-honed scythe
Your voice goes from the twine that twisted up your ankles
To the crystallized light that filters in between the leaves of trees
The crackle of firewood on a misty evening
The waves that slip on shell-laden sand
You won’t move so much as whisper
Talk so much as laugh
Be so much as exist
The earth is a ball of twine
We all walk in pedestrian ballet slippers
Die into beauty that we’d never thought we’d flow to
Never going where we need to or where we want to be
Your string is caught up in a thousand others
Twisted with mis-steps and calls made over soup cans
We are a thousand beats off rhythm in melody
A thousand stories in tugs and sound


Welcome to Earth
A world of 7 billion connections
Silence instead of answers
Once thousand languages to say seven billion stories
french pavestones in Paris
abuelos who step in rhythm
Dead who live in warmth
Welcome to earth
Population: twined

If there is a god
We all must be chess pieces
Our anger trickles down from the powerful ones
(Who play monopoly with real estate agents)

-C.A.S.

I once met a girl made of flower petals
She was lovely in all her thousand pieces
Colors curling deliciously across her skin
Honey dewdrop tears whispering down her cheeks

She tried to kiss me but her lips were shadows
Cigarette flame breath dripping up my nose
Sweetness traced the corner of my eye
And she prayed, “I am gone, love, I am gone”

I once met a girl made of holy sin
Story up in flames and eyes of shattered glass
She whispered sanity and climbed the stairs to hell
As her world drowned in vibrant ghosts.

Love is the crushed diamond white of summer snow, blemished with frost burned sprouts and the last of fall’s molding leaves. It sprinkles the road like powdered sugar, glittering in the sunshine and merging with melting rain. The snow is not perfect- It has little hills and footprints and muddy swirls, ringed by spring finches chirping petulantly over the bruised cherries that have rolled on down the hill. A worn red scarf loops round a carrot in a pile of melted frost, coal pieces staining the white ground gray. The footprints on the ground are from two people dancing to music that flows between them, sending the birds squawking and shadowing the flowers that twist and vine out of the winter, smelling like pure sweetness when crushed below twirling feet.  The powdered sugar snow is not perfectly spread, but standing still has never been the best way to dance.