When cold days leave you anchored to your bed what is it to           Live

My Grandmothers creased and gregarious eyes radiate                      Life

Just as the shoots of grass reach to kiss the sky oh so               Simplistically

I always think I know it all,
Yet every day I learn so much.
I think of how I don't miss you at all,
Yet every night I yearn so much.
You were the spine to the book of my life,
The stitches closing the wound from their knife,
But now my pages are out of order, like a scrambled and hurriedly written essay,
And I'm bleeding out every second, even to this day.

I want to undress the sorrow that bites the wings off doves, make it bear, make it holy, make it scream.

I want to sing to the anger that shakes your hands, beads the sweat upon your palms. I want to soothe it to sadness, soothe it to scared, soothe it to self-loathing, and then soothe it again. I want to rub its shaking shoulders and kiss its forehead until it is serene, sleeping in the backseat.

I want to whisper the stories from all my birthdays and what age means to the God that chokes the air from your blood and puts fear into the stomach of mothers. I want to calm the waves of your heart, be the lighthouse to the way you felt at age five, wrapped in the forgiving and fragile skinned arms of your grandfather.

I want to be the lung unchanged by smoker's death wish. I want to be the alcohol that slips passed your lips and makes you tell your mom that you love her, tell your sister it wasn't her fault, tell your dad that you're healing. I want to be the ****** that moves under your marked skin, the blood that can't pass the tourniquet.

I want to feel myself inside your throat, climbing to taste your teeth and thread string through the spaces between your words, make a tapestry of every missing apology.

I want to be the wind shaking the curtains of every girl who has starved herself, cold and realizing that a woman is not a body, a woman is the bearer of life and bearer of tenderness. A girl eating an apple, telling the grass that the moon is everyone's mother and will never let the tides rise or fall without a gentle tug on the sleeve of the oceans, "breathe".

I want to be the life that moves through the earth, the snapshots in motion that we call time, the peace that the bottom of our lungs must feel.

The Pen
The pick up the pen;
The put it down again
(That sunken feeling, nemesis or friend?)
The pen. The Pen.
The pacing, the pressing up against
The period. Stop stopping
Again. Pick it up to put it down.
Pointless. Pshaw.
Please.
Please me simplicity. C’mon!
C’mon pen lemme pick it up
And put something down.

I’ll plagiarize the flow for a few words of my own.
I’m looking for inspiration from the great beyond.
My muse is missing.
I know the medium is a constraint.
I know inside
The set of symbols paints
Me into a corner.  The parameters
Of my pen’s head worn out. I’m ******. The metaphors
Pressed. The pen is second-guessed.

A literate piece of poetic license,

The defense mechanism
Against the prison I impose.
Me, myself, and I inside
The pen pining for a purpose.
The nexus of picking it up and putting it down
Is perplexing me, is vexing
Me like a sticky keyboard key.
So, I’m putting it all down
With the pen.

The pen.
The picking it up: who cares?
The putting it down: pensive prohibition.
The picking up; what I left out.
The putting it down: polygraph precision.
The picking up where I left off:
The putting it down: priority, what’s left of me.
The picking it up, when I don’t even know
Why I bother?
The putting it down: passion
The putting it down: plea of let me be.  
The putting it down periscope; I’m diving under  
The pressure’s mounting; I’m down for the counting on my muse
To bring me back
From that inky black abyss once again
My personal sonar is
Probing the depths, of what lies
hidden within
the pen.