Sometimes my words do not  adequately describe how I feel

Why does thinking of love
Make me think of you?
I don't even get it

Why is love thought to be so strong
When you can love a pair of shoes

Why is love tied with loss
Was it asked to

How does love tie with you?

The idea is so nice
That there could be a me and you
A me with a you
Just the idea of you being mine
Buts a smile on my face
And happiness on my mind

Deep within the lyrics


The closest thing I know to love¬
Is something I am thinking of
In every sorted worry that my mind decides to share

While drinking heavy in the past
Inside the shadows I now cast
The bottom of the bottle lets me know I am aware

Collecting on a shouldered score
Finding it is nothing more
Than voiced in my confessions of imaginary scenes

Reaching for a photograph
Searching for its aftermath
Tuning off the station in the middle of my dreams

The fury of this drunken bliss
Reminds me of your tender kiss
Though never having felt it, it is something that I long

For in the end this fairy tale
Reminds me of my quest to fail
Deep within the lyrics of some broken hearted song

I am not the author of my thoughts nor am I the poet whose poems you read.
I am only a vessel through which life exists; a witless witness of what befalls this body and mind.
Please excuse my false pride,
Forgive me my claims of titles and names.
I am merely the ghost in the machine within which I experience taste, touch, sight, smell and the chaos of clarity of mind.  
I once knew with the certainty of the lost that I was the master of this universe,
Now I bow my head in pious recognition of defeated acceptance. Life is not to be lived,
Life is to be survived.
Free will is a conception of man's need and desire for order in a land where particles too small to be seen or felt rule with the supremacy of god.
We are nothing more than fish in the sea unaware of the ebbs and flows of the ocean around us in response to a moon we cannot even conceptualize.
There is peace in that thought;
If you can accept your insignificance you will realize how little that lost love matters for what is love but a micro atomic reaction to a cosmic event that happened light years from earth,
In which you were the victim of a joke you can't even understand.

Rolled tight and sealed
with my lips this pome
I wrote for you
and placed inside a bottle
Tide is going out
as the sun is setting
with a pome inside a bottle
and you still on my mind
Blue winds and waves
will bring it to you
This pome inside a bottle
Just another love song
like the ones we used to listen to
as the moon rose o'er the ocean
watching the tide come in.

r ~ 7/25/14

Andrea Gibson

Introduction:  A couple years ago, I was told a story about a soldier who was set on fire and burned to death because he was gay. After that, I started reading similar stories about people in the GLBTQ community who were tortured or killed by being set on fire and burned. I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who had died that way and couldn’t stop wondering what they might say from where they are now.

The night I was torn from the pages of their Bible
and burned alive
my ashes came down like snow
and a girl who had never seen my face
saw me falling from the sky
and laid down on her back
to make an angel in the powder of my bones.

From heaven, I watched her,
‘though my eyes were still aflame,
and my ribs were still blue.
They didn’t win, I whispered, as her arms built my wings.
They didn’t win.
Look at that moon.
It is a pebble in my hand
Tonight, I could skip it across that fog-drunk sea
to the lashes accordion in the night
and all they know of hate
is that it couldn’t beat the love out of me…

that when they dropped me to the grave,
I fell like a bucket in to a well
and came up full;
carving my lover’s name
into the skin of a weeping willow
that had spent its entire life laughing at the rain.

Hold me like a lantern;
staircase my spine
When they bring the children to my funeral
to scream “******!” at my dust
tell them I was born in to their casket
but I wouldn’t pull the splinters from my heart
any more than Christ would’ve pulled the thorns
from his crimson head.

They can come a thousand times
with their burning matches and their gasoline,
with their hungry laws
and their empty mouths full of prayers to that god
who greeted me at his gates with his throat full of trumpets
and his tears full of shame
as his trembling palms collected the cinders
of his children’s crime.

I know what holy is
I know that the soul is shaped like a bowl;
I know the lies we try to fill it with
and we spill too often
the orchards inside.

But my lover’s shoes were tied with guitar strings
and when I walked beside
there was a silo in my chest,
there was a field full of sun.
there was a river full of gold that we left
to pick our sweet hearts from the trees
that kept uprooting tombstones
so the names of the dead would crumble in to poems.

Write me down like this:
Say my ashes never made the news.
Say the jury was full of shotguns.
Then say the snow that fell on the tip of your tongue
refused to melt away.
Say this to the kids hiding their heartbeats
from their father’s fists.

I planted the garden of my kiss.
I opened the night with my teeth.
I loved so hard that when they pressed their ear to the track
the train they hear coming will still be my chest,
a rumbling harpoon,
a sky they can not bury.

Look at that moon.
I am a pebble in her hand;
a harmonica held to the mouth of the river
where nothing ever burns.

while september cicadas
were singing my neighbors to sleep
i was up walking holes in my shoes
over love once lost
so many poems ago
that the only thing i remember
about the house at 38th & bluestone
is that it reeked of alcohol and is
as i'm sure of it
still saturated in perfume
and abandoned laughter
but that's not the point
give me a minute
what i'm trying to say
is i always thought god
enjoyed watching things leave me
it makes me wonder
what was on his mind
that night in september
when i stooped to cough
or tie my shoelaces
i no longer remember why
but i recall their trajectory
the way gravity cradled my hands
and brought them crashing back to earth like a 747
they landed inches away
from a scrap of crumpled loose leaf
folded in half like the smiles
of my relatives on a holiday truce
you see, lately i've been looking for scars in the newspaper
i find myself checking the obituary
for my former selves since the day i found your suicide letter
maybe that's why i can never explain my obsession with history
maybe archeology is just a funeral
in reverse
maybe hell is just rewinding home movies
or watching confetti
turn back into photographs
i never told anyone
the reason the doors to the gun cabinet in my family's house are locked not because they are afraid
i will take my life
but because sometimes
i sing them birthday songs
on the day you died
it makes me think
of how rooms only echo
when they are empty

*you know
i never echoed until you died

His Down's Syndrome makes
His age a tough guess, I'll
Say eight to ten.

Wide eyes on machines,
Ice cream dripping on the
Pavement outside the

Construction site.
I wanna work like this when
I grow up, he says in

Young enthusiasm to a mother
Whose eyes well up with
Gratitude when I approach

And kneel down in front of
Him. So you want a job,
Buddy? I ask him with a

Wink. He suddenly remembers
His ice cream and bites into
It shyly. Nods, glancing at the

Tools in my belt, the scratches
On my arms, the brick wall
I've been attacking with a

Wacker jackhammer. Nods
Again. Well, I'll see you in a
Few years, I say with another

Wink, this time to his mother,
Who'd look her young age if
Her eyes weren't as tired,

But you can start with this
And get some practice. I hand
Him my Stanley Fat Max

Hammer. His ice cream
Hits the ground as he
Recieves it with both hands,

Looking to his mother for
Confirmation that it's ok.
Oh, it is. She mouths a

Thank you SO much...
They walk away, his chatter
High pitched and fading

Around the corner. And I
Head over to the foreman to
Report that I lost my hammer.

Don't ever employ me.
I can work a good game, but
I'm too soft around little heroes.

The day we met
Will never be forgotten
The sun was shining through
Reflecting on the ocean oh so blue
Sparkling like diamonds
Like your eyes do too
With a smile that can be seen
From miles away
Gravitating me towards you
My heart skips a beat
When you call my name
My life will never be the same
You are my Romeo
I am your Juliet
The moments we spent together
I will never forget
You showered me with diamonds
And other fancy things
Taking me to dinner
And pulling out my seat
Treating me like royalty
But clearly it was never meant to be
Because it was only in a movie.