we drove for over an hour yesterday to
reach mother nature's home,
a playground for adults,
we only wanted to reach a destination
that held sincere afterthoughts and
the smell of moss covering our sight.
it was off the grid, only the locals
could direct you to the tree coverings
and caves that whales could sleep in,
but my brother and i decided it
was only right to keep looking on
our own, we have stubbornness
engraved on our foreheads.
not short of three hours into the
wilderness, wearing out our shoes
and losing energy in our joints,
we found panther caves parallel
to where my brother and
his roommate from iraq
dragged on cigarettes for answers
to show them the way to go.
they were magnificent with majestic
slabs of sediments that had stories
dating from the 1800's,
graffiti painted in fluorescent shades
and charcoal from the last fire,
presented on the highest cliff
as if the last person had something
to prove.
we climbed and angled our bodies
like contortionists, we
were nothing short from nature -
our existence was made here,
within the grains of sand and
the tangled roots from trees
growing on the embankments.
i wanted that to be reality.
when we found our boundaries
and landed back into the car,
we drove away in silence because
our eyes were heavy and our hands
could tell facts of frustration,
senselessness, livelihood, and something
words cannot measure up to.
that world could be my gateway drug,
the ignorant bliss from social networking,
the war with no apparent reasoning (with the
amount of debt we are in),
the pressure on myself.
i felt so simple when everything else
has been so complex.
i now know i want to be an architect
of the woods, to preserve
the chiseled names of strangers
who felt alive, who had nowhere
else to be at that moment.
i want to be a navigator,
the one who could tell you what
the markings on the bark meant.
i want to fall into a love so deep,
only the leaves could catch me.

i think i found home.

you are the home for my strings,
the things that sting, it's the venom
in the vessels,
like the one that you carry
under your muscles,
structures built to give character.
they ache from the weight of
the rocks compiled in a safebox,
it hold the glow of the liquid
savior that could someday find you.
they act like weights,
heavy on your shoulders,
boulders on your toes.
i'm sorry i left like that
i just needed to catch my knees
from hitting rock bottom.
i guess sometimes it's better to leave it
alone than to dig it back up,
but you and i know that
lock boxes can keep you from
opening up, the key is
stuck in the mechanics
like a child too curious
for its own good.

i found a birthmark shaped like Alaska
on the inside of your kneecap,
and i only saw it the day you
let me cross the border;
it was sensitive to my touch,
the moon-like ripples leading
to the needles on the pine tree
in your back yard.
sometimes i can read behind the
lines of DNA makeup,
like the lonely biologist you seem to be,
but your lingo is foreign to me,
tattered words and language deficiencies,
i can hardly follow along the braille
carved onto your outer layer,
the marble you worked so hard to
weather on your own time.
yet, somehow its turned to rubble again.
sometimes i hold an out of order sign
against my breastbone so i can set eyes
straight and wish anyone would light me on
fire,
           (but not literally, i'm absolutely against abuse)
i want the sticks but not the stones,
since wood won't leave my body bruised.
use my transitions for kindle,
and my organs for the flames.
i want to be colored red,
like ambulance lights, stop signs,
painted like a signature to warn others
how my frequencies can only be heard
by animals.
maybe some other life forms,
or god,
but i have never hoped more that
you would pick up on my signals,
my freckles scream out samples
of how this could be
or what we could have known.