I delicately tread barefoot
along this tightrope of barbed wire.
Too painful to go on
to deadly to fall off.
Eventually I will just stand still,
balanced, let my wounds scar over,
graft the wire to my feet.
Become a part of the human race.

This poem is reserved
for the love of my life
Its lines are only
placeholders
templates
for what is to come

There is no meaning right now
so don't go and search for it
These are cold, emotionless words
ready to be replaced with fire
when the time is right

This stanza will be filled at a later date
This line will be about her laugh
This line will be about the look she gives me (you know the one)
This line will be about the spark in her eyes
This line...mmm...will be none of your **** business.
It's a private moment
It's between her and I
The one with the reservation
to my heart

One day this poem will mean something
One day these lines won't be empty
Someday

But not today

I am there
Wishing that if I pressed my fingers to your lips
I could understand the broken Braille of your breath
When your throat locks in the noise

Gentle butterfly gut
Fanning flames over burning cinderblocks in your belly
I am there

When you wished the moon in a rearview mirror
Heading west
Wondering if you really could go far enough to see its dark side
When you wanted to turn back
I was there

When she drank razorblades
And Tylenol ink
Into a botched suicide note
I was there

This is the journey

When he wondered when he could hold somebody again
Like a waterbed full of blood
Without the motion sickness
I was there

Every moment y’all
Of your ***** sacred
I want to be there
So when you see that this place is so big
And you are so small
And our souls might be stardust and minerals
Burning blue so far away
At least you’re not alone

Your body is built for love
She said
Beer breathed and true
I smiled
I was there

Kiss me with your car parts
DUI this knee buckle
I want to be tried and arrested
Spit out and spanked
And I will still kneel before you
And praise all that is good in you
Because you are holy

Every moment of you is holy

I was there
Begging to be baptized by your presence
Because in a place so big
I don’t want to feel so alone anymore

I want to kiss you
I want to kiss you
Like you are better
Than everything you’ve ever done
You are

I was there
When the world inside your breastplate
Spun natural disaster
And sunshine
Anvil remorse
And sweet laughter
When I held you
Any of you
And our worlds
Vibrated a conversation only our souls could understand

I was there
And all we could speak was “LOVE”
All we could speak was “Us”

Supposedly beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Which is super gay
So when I say you are beautiful
This is what I mean

You are beautiful in the same way
That the word, “believe” in sign language
Can translate to being married to your own thoughts

When a person sees something beautiful
Their pupils can increase up to 45 percent in size
I’m not high today I swear
Just that
You surprise me every time

Your left lung is smaller than your right
So it can make room for your heart
That’s just biology

And when they say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach
When people blush
Their stomach lining turns red too

Laughing lowers stress
A 7 year old can laugh almost six hundred times in one day
An adult
13 to 100
I want to make you laugh like we are 7 again

I was 7 once
I’ve had seventeen years practice since then

When you put a shell to your ear
What you are really hearing is the sound of your own blood
Rushing through your ears
There is a ******* ocean inside of you
That swells like lungs
And rushes a steady current of mostly
Unattractive creatures
You are like the bottom of the sea
All single celled and fight for life
In darkness

And maybe that doesn’t seem too beautiful
But you don’t really know what’s down there
Do you?

You are beautiful like old people
Who think you are sweet
Because you’ve had enough patience
To match their pace
“I don’t know when I got old” she said
“But I wasn’t ready. It took me ten years to figure this place out.
“I’m 94. I don’t have another ten.”
And she kissed me

Beautiful like poetry
When poetry hurts the most
When it gives you goose-bumps

And I bet if I stuck my arm inside a music box
To let my chilled skin pluck the metal keys inside
There wouldn’t be music
I am too soft
And it would hurt
But it looks like if I were hard enough
There might be
It would sound like chaos
The keys are beautiful
But the sound inconsistent

Beautiful
Like the collaboration of molecules
That understood pointillism enough to make me
But still experimental
So they gave me cancer
And I’m shorter than I want to be
And I am pretty sure they are laughing
About what they did to my brain
But my lungs are perfectly uneven
So my heart can pump oceans
So I can move and be stupid
And do things like tell you

You are ******* beautiful

to define love.
You'll be baffled
bewildered & broken by the end.

The cynical ones
will laugh,
say it's dead,
overused and cliche.
Why try write what Whitman, Dickinson, Frost & Shakespeare
have already covered?

The romantic ones
will wax on for hours
describing inner & outer beauty
compared to anything that strikes their eye.
Why can't you see it's everywhere?

The hip ones
will scare you,
take a ****
& describe some detailed carnal fantasy
involving tapioca & a talking *****
named Pony.

Ask a lawyer,
they could tell you the legal definition.

Ask your parents,
they will tell you something trite about seeing it through.

Ask little kids
for an adorably wise response.

Ask a dog
as it's ******* your leg.

Ask a scientist,
they will describe the chemical reactions in the brain.

Ask a prisoner,
they will tell you it's something they miss.

But never ask a poet
to define love.
Your brain will hurt,
half your day gone
& you'll be left heart broken
by the end.

I was concerned
When friends told me
'Love is blind'

Well, why was I
One to worry?
For what they said in church

They taught to me
'God is love'
I paid attention in math

See, if God is love
and love is blind
then God is blind

Now it makes sense
For so much to pass
Why good don't last

And to why we're flawed
It's clear as glass
For God blinds us all

We sipped boulder rock from refrigerators doors
and watched the heavens hand out food stamps with IBM logos.
“ode to Mehmet” we sang, and licked the Mossberg—
fixating on the blue collar philosophy that lived in our empty wallets.

Trash cans filled with water bottles stared at us to find our essence—
the one we had lost while being fed quintessential American idioms
in state-of-the-art classrooms sponsored by slaves and Popol Vuh blood.

Six million years of human existence trivialized down to a single sentence—
* Man loved God, man wrote, man conquered God, and now man loves science* —
scribbled on SmartBoards afforded by fire burning from Prometheus’ female liver.

Trees sing with oxygen no more for the sake of making paper,
and eyes soak in the words on paper for the sake of making paper.
Trees make the avenue but the future holds an Avenue of no trees—
… for in the land of the free, anything but freedom ain’t free.