I’ve been writing this poem
for three years now.
The buildup to a cataclysmic revelation
the understanding that, yes, we are a perfect race.
The knowledge of a people so wide,
it will be carved into minds and taught to stone
until the end of time.
But you cannot change
the way people sip their wine.
Cannot comprehend the understanding
of the earth to the sun as she sets.
Where ballet slippers break the dancers,
not the other way around. Where the
deepest oceans are left empty,
where predator and prey both fail
and love is a prospect of fantasy;
beautiful, and you wish it to be true
but something only beautiful, real, and forever
in fairy-tale books.
written by those
who cannot find their voice.

Break me. Take me. Let me run with wild abandon, lift up
into the sky, fall down, be free— Give me a place where
even the weariest of the wild can have endless freedom,
a place to run to, a lone life to live
And everything but rest.

You ask me to stay still, grow quiet as the mountains.
I can hear the whispered prayers streaming from your mouth;
they trickle from your lips to the bald eagle to the dry creak bed.
But they will reach me only in my collapse,
not because I can’t go on, but because you
weigh
me
down.
.
.
­ …
And I can feel my bones breaking.
The canyons, the hills on their bare white surface
whistling in the wind I struggle to find again.
You press pink lips against them, whispering to stop, more fierce
than all that calls to me. Of love and forever, more wild
than all I have known.
I will stop running, I will give in
Just to have love-worshipped skin.


Let me run through the wind,
I’ll let you lead me through the water.
Forgive me
for once loving freedom more than you.
Just keep calling to me,
stronger than the sea.
I am broken now,
                                        you can’t abandon me.