I do not know how the fashionable people of the past did it.
How were they able to sit still for hours on end?
Shouldn't having money mean doing more?
For I've found that if I sit around for too long,
I stagnate like water, I thicken like blood.

I need to move, need to run in order to breathe,
Need to laugh in order to feel like I exist at all.
Without the confirmation that is my own beating body,
My own moving heart, I might as well fade away,
Might as well be a pixel of static on a TV screen.

In the early morning hours as I lie awake in bed,
I can feel myself slipping away into nothing.
I know that if I lay there long enough I will melt
Into my blankets, and cease to exist.
Most mornings I force myself to move,
Force myself into movement, back into existence!

But some dark rainy day, too soon I fear,
I will lie back on the pillows
and let the sheets take their toll
and I will die even as I live:
stagnant like water
thick like blood.

when I get sad,
I told my therapist,
it's like static.
it drowns out
my thoughts. it numbs
my skin.
it makes the ocean seem
like a beautiful place
to spend eternity, it
makes blood want to rush
like music and my heart
wants to swell full
of chords and fervor
but it can't. that static
drowns it all out.
when I am happy there is
humming, there are symphonies,
in golden light
I dance with friends
and lovers,
but the static isn't switched off.
it's still there like an old TV
in the back corner
of a forgotten basement room
and when I get sad
I leave the sunlight leave
the party and go
and sit and I stare
at the static on that TV
and it fills my head
and my eyes and
my whole body up with
fear and longing and
a great big static-y void.
then
I wake one morning
in my own bed full
of static memories
still fuzzy
around the edges
but alive.
one day I will go
to that place far
beyond any sound
and the vibrations my heart beat out
will join the background
hum of the universe
disrupting radios
the energy that once was me
will be a single note
a little song,
a silent melody,
forever, and I will be
free from static.

Huddled deep in the dark quiet of the ever-turning earth
Like a secret kept for years, a secret kept from birth,
Taking the form of sorrow as it slides down your cheeks
And shattering simply against the hospital sheets.

It doesn't make sense, you don't understand
This was not what you'd hoped for, not what you'd planned
You thought there'd be life, thought there'd be breath
But what you see before you is cold, silent death.

It swells up inside you and bursts at your seams
Invades your thoughts and twists all your dreams
Till something inside you first cracks, then it snaps
You don't know what can fix it. Nothing, perhaps.

In a city where it's all about control
The students and the teachers are the oppressed today
This entire school is just a straitjacket
Waiting to reach its fingers of conformity up and around our throats,
Waiting to twist all the differences out of us,
Waiting to write a curriculum, a test that can be taken,
One to measure our minds, our thoughts, our hearts

Don't those ******* know
It's not their job to compare us?
And besides, you can't gauge emotion
Or tell me that my heart is below average
You can't say to me that I'm not thinking properly.

*******, there's no "right thought" I can have.
It's not a matter of how much I love or who.
You can't look at me once and say you know my soul.
But you would love that, wouldn't you? You'd love
To label everything, and neatly shelve it away,
In some great and empty vault, where you'll only constrain its potential.
By writing such a test you would be condemning all of us to eternal emptiness.

I think they've got it wrong.
I don't think the point of life
is to be productive. I think
the point of life is to live,
and if you can look back on
what you've done and say "I
changed that," if you can say
"I opened their eyes," if you
can sit there and not give a ****
about productivity and your
titles then I think that just
maybe you're doing something
right.

The dreamers are here again, they say
They see our eyes drawn open, they see us blinking in the sunlight,
Taking tentative steps towards each other, away from the walls and into the fields
Where off come our shoes, and we run, barefoot,
Into water splashed with sunlight, and through the sky the great golden orb arches,
Spinning summer into the north.

I know what they're thinking. They think we've stopped dreaming.
Because we open our eyes and laugh with them,
Because we're consciously reacting to this reality,
They think it's the only one that matters.

They think that somehow, being awake means we're not asleep.

You'd have to be one of us to understand how many worlds you can coexist in at once, without losing sight of ourselves.

Years later what you will remember most is the sunshine
And the way it pooled in the streets in the summertime
Pulling colors off of buildings like taking washing off the line
Painted bodies everywhere, laughing as they waltz through the city
There is no difference between red yellow black white or grey
It’s all just more color, people splattered with diversity
Climbing the trees to decorate with rainbow streamers
In their doorways stand hesitant half-believers
Pass me the pipe and count me with the dreamers

And the rest of the world, they call us freaks
We might as well be hipsters hippies jocks nerds geeks
Here definition is something no one seeks
Children at play is all we have ever been
Hoping our mothers won’t catch us fighting again
Let your hate go, let your mind heart and eyes open

Love is what ties us together, what makes us strong
You don’t have to prove that you’re right or I’m wrong
Just raise your voice and join in the throng
We’ll climb through your windows and through your walls
Claiming plaster back to nature, painting flowers down your halls
Planting trees in the classrooms and the public toilet stalls
We won’t rest, no we won’t wait until every stretch
Of old stone house and weathered park bench
Of city block and building’s been covered in some colorful sketch

Say what you will, we are who we are
It's our hopes for the future that have led us this far
We're not afraid, not alone, though the lines may blur
We stand for a future with no hate at all
We stand for human rights and we will not fall
We're the people of Fremont and we stand tall

There are some things you will never see.
But you wish you could. You wish that there were other worlds
Close enough to brush with your fingertips.
You wish that others' dreams, their syntheses of sound,
Would make sense to you. You do not live
In this world of cubicles and blinking lights,
And if you do, you live it a hundred thousand light years away,
On the surface of some other planet.
You're not ever going to grow up. All your life,
You'll keep on imagining worlds beyond the one they swear is real.
You must have your writing because you understand
That life, even this one, is not linear. Life is not
Birth to death, and in between survival.

For now you are surviving.
But you know there is so much more than that.

imagine,            just imagine;       it says,
                                                                   it calls, it cries
against               the                             magnificent                                                                         vacuous
                          everything                 it echoes and                 whispers
            with the                  voices of                          the mind.
but no one                       strains to listen,
                not one                        thought             in its head                                                            will unwind.

                                                                         we                cannot      convince ourselves of life
beyond what we see,  we do not think
in                          concepts                                    of                                               infinity.

and here we find                 the             error       in       the        humane-
  here lies our great struggle,                                   here our great pain-
                                  we don't want to let go of what makes us unique,
                                                          don't want to     l   o    s     e       ourselves to the concrete
   the cities will rise up and the nations will
                                                                             f
                                                                                a
                                                                                    l
                                                                                        l,
                                                                                                  
                                                                                            but we can't find the method in the madness of it all.

In my house
It smells like burning nachos
Like pico de gallo left to rot
And beans too long on the stove.

I stand in the doorway
Keys in one hand, doorknob in the other.
It's snowing outside, and I'd forgotten
That I'd asked you over that afternoon,
Just to talk.
Maybe watch TV.

For three and a half years now, we've been best friends.
But there was a different time,
When we didn't talk to each other,
When we let teenage angst and hatred seethe
Between us like some dark and twisted monster.

There are different kinds of anger.
I was mad at you because in the summer
Between seventh and eighth grade, you flaked on me
For those other girls, the ones who wore bikinis
And whose dads had speedboats and sports cars,
Whose boyfriends were in high school,
Who wore black eyeliner and gossiped all the time.
I was mad because you changed yourself for them.
I thought that that was why you were avoiding me.

Today you told me
You were mad at me
Because we liked the same boy.
You said you thought I resented you for it.

I laughed.
This is why we have these talks -
So that, looking back on our junior high selves,
We can make fun of what idiots we are.

drinking tea and drawing sweaters well past midnight
I am content to sit here and just be sitting here
I'll solve my problems in the morning;
it's way too hard
to try and talk to people after sundown.
so many people shut themselves off
after dark and after darkness
so many people never bother
to open themselves up.

my life is a book that I love too much
to let it end.
I wonder if people who are going to die
know that they are going to die
if they can feel the inevitability
of their own oblivion
in the seconds before it begins.
and were you out at the coffee shop
buying scones as her heartbeat
             slowed   and     stuttered            and                          stopped


my tea's getting cold.

You're always running away from something, aren't you?
I mean, all of humanity is constantly trying to fix,
To solve, to make right. We search in these nearby places
For the answers, and don't tend to realize that yes, the
Answers are out there, but they're on top of that mountain
Or over that hill and all the while your heart's saying,
Why don't you look there but your head says No
No no it has to be this why on earth do you listen to it?
And you run and you hide away in that laboratory of yours
And mix together this amount of comfort with that amount
Of painkiller and think that somehow it has to be complex,
It can't be simple. I'm here to say that yes, yes it can. It really
Can be just that simple. It doesn't have to be long and
Drawn-out and rewritten and careful. It can be something
Short and sweet and spontaneous like a first kiss or a
Mountain flower, something alive and growing and changing,
And not concrete; not once, not now, not ever.

smell of sidewalks after rain as we walked back to the car.
i like to pretend i live here, under the great spreading trees
in an old, beautiful house with someone i love.
i want to grow old in a house like that,
with a big, flowering front yard, a creaky old porch,
a vegetable garden, a jar of buttons, a cat, a climbing-tree.
i want to watch the sun through the leaves,
hear the rain on the roof, fix up its leaks,
paint the walls, frame the pictures,
position little ceramic birds artistically on tables,
fill cases and boxes and shelves and rooms with books
and art and laughter and life and love.
i want to fill a house with my warmth
nest in it, curl up against its walls and breathe it in,
bring fresh flowers to the kitchen,
dance alone in the living room.
my house. my kitchen, my walls, my living room.
i want to fill a whole building with my choices,
with who i choose to be, with who i choose to love.
i don't know what my life will be but
it would be nice to grow old
in a house with a climbing-tree.

Deep beneath the ground, there she sings
The girl, the one with ivy leaves in her hair
Sings a song to the birds to the trees
To the great wide and wonderful everything she sings

She's been dead a long, long time
The girl, the one who sings to everything
Winter came and carpeted her grave in snow,
Huddled on the frozen ground her headstone lay

Into her dark hair she weaves the ivy leaves
The girl, the one whose grave is covered in snow
In her soul she plants their all-consuming seeds,
To come and cover the winter over in green

In a castle far away, there she sang
The girl, the one who sows the ivy seeds
Sang a song to the birds to the trees
To the great wide and wonderful everything she sang

She would have lived a long, long time
The girl, the one who sang to everything
Before her grave was dug she knew the world
All covered over in the green of ivy leaves

If only she hadn't fallen in love with the boy
The girl, the one who saw the green of ivy leaves
He took her heart away with him, away to the war,
Left her to face the winter alone and heartless.

She wouldn't have caught the chills then,
The girl, the one who gave her heart to the boy
Wouldn't have frozen in the castle made of stone
If she hadn't loved him enough to stay alone.

They found her in the morning, all the colour fled
The girl, the one who loved him and froze
From her cheeks and heartbeat from her hands
And her eyes wide, frozen open

He shed a thousand tears for her, you know
The boy, the one who lost his love to the cold
Cried until there was nothing left inside him but his fear
He squared his shoulders, ready to face his fate

He lived his whole life true to her, you know
The boy, the one who cried a thousand tears
Lived until it was all used up, then walked down that road
And joined her deep beneath the earth,
Where they now sing to the great wide and wonderful everything,
Planting ivy seeds in hope of spring.

I can't sleep
when the stars aren't out
so instead
of lying awake
300 nights of the year I
put glow-stars on my ceiling
thinking it would help

But these are
poor replicas of real stars,
dishonest reproductions
of the wild and infinite
cosmos.
I sleep better now but it
is the sleep of a liar:
I awake often and know
that above me
is spread a false sky.

It is a good thing that your life is long,
And your heart beats deep.
Fires blaze red for you, laughs, a song:
And the wine still runs sweet.

All will be ashes soon enough,
The smiles will fade, and the laughter
Run out. What once was tough
With youth will wrinkle and wither.

The in-between, the years that pass
As your glory and passion flicker,
Before your bones rest beneath the grass,
Make your smile softer, your hide thicker.

Don't discount the days not written down in song,
For it is a good thing your life is still long.

I ate a ******* today.
It was the second ******* I've ever had,
and probably the last one
I'll ever have.
These things were supposed to last
for ******* ever.
They were supposed to outlive
the apocalypse
but now they're
pretty much
gone.

If you think this is some metaphor
for the impermanence of
humanity, or for that teenage
lover you wanted to give yourself
over to, forever,
or for lazy Sunday afternoons
when the world just
floats
on
by,
you are
correct.

We live our lives by impermanent things
we tie our life-lines to twigs
that will snap at the first sign
of the wind. I cannot
un-break your heart,
or tell you that these
things are
unimportant.
They are important.
They are as
important as daydreams, as childhood,
as light and air and food
and water.
But they will not last
forever. They are less eternal
than the footprints you leave
in wet concrete:
those will still be there
in the morning.

And if I cannot tie our impermanent
physicality to the fate of
the last ******* on Earth
in a strange metaphor,
then I do not deserve
to have eaten it at all.

there are
places in this world
sinking
and abandoned
by humankind
full of life
and raw
with the beauty of
rebirth; i want
to wander
through those
great cracked halls
seeping out
daises and ivy
with you,
and breathe
the air thick
with grass
and dirt, thick
with springtime
buds of life,
and breathe
the air, swollen
with dew, back
into your lungs.

It was summer in California and life was perfect.

        “I’m starting to understand what it means to really live,” he said, breaking the noon silence.

She stirred against the rough wood of the dock.

“I mean…” he cleared his throat. “I don’t know. I feel alive right now like I haven’t in ages.”

Her clear blue eyes stared up at his tanned face.

He hugged his legs to his chest, resting his chin on his scarred knees. “I love this place so much.”

Sighing, she pulled herself up to stare out across the water with him.

“Look at all that ocean,” he said. “You could just sail forever across all that ocean.”

She looked away and rolled her eyes.

“I want to someday, you know,” he continued. “Take a boat out there and just sail…” his voice trailed off, heavy with longing.

She sighed again. The sun was too warm on her skin. The sea was too much salt and water for her. He was too much of a dreamer. But all of the west coast was like that. Too many dreams, not enough reality. After summer break was over she’d go back east and finish school and get a real job as a lawyer and win her cases.

“I don’t even know if I’d ever come back.”

Picking up her shoes, she stood and started walking towards the car.

        He turned slightly when he heard the engine rev and pull up the street, away from the dock.

“No,” he said, after some time. “I wouldn’t come back.”

He stood. Then he began to run. In his t shirt and board shorts, he plunged head first into the sunlit sea. The wet cotton clung to him as he swam. He kept going until he couldn’t go anymore, far away from the shores of Coronado and its people.

The sun was high, and finally he realized that he could not go back if he wanted to. He hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t really know which way the beach was. He drifted with the Pacific tide, treading water gently. He realized it could never have been any other way but this - there was nothing left for him back on shore. His parents were both dead, his sister moved far away long ago. Everyone he knew wouldn't really miss him. And living on the beach for the rest of his life, no one wanted that. Even taking a boat out there like he had said was impossible, as he had no money and was too lazy to pursue any of his dreams. No. This was the way it had to be.
        
        Eventually he passed out with the simple exhaustion of staying alive and the water closed over his head.

It was summer in California and life was perfect.

You can pretend with a day of words unspoken
But the noise is still there-
Lingering beneath your skin,
Running through your veins like electricity.

You can think that you are silent
That they don't know your name (brother, sister, friend)
That they don't notice you (you're not invisible)
I? I am all of these things
And none of them. I am silent,
I am invisible, I am alone,
I am words unspoken, I am names unkown.

You don't know me, know me at all
Until you have climbed your mountain
At sunrise and breathed in
The whole world stretched out before you
And sighing and singing with you.

You don't know me, know me at all
Not until it's the silences that whisper in your veins:
Blood hidden under skin, breathe it out and let it in,
The morning tainted pink by your breath.

My aunt slept for six months,
All of fall and most of winter.
Sometimes she'd talk, but it was nonsense.
Sometimes her glassy blue eyes
Would click open and roll about,
Stretching the sunken yellow paper of her face.
Her skull was bare and the neat square
Of black stitches made my stomach writhe.
And everything that proved she was human was gone-
Consciousness absent, eyes closed, skin warped;
Just that faltering mechanical tick-tick in her chest where her beating heart should've been.

A little girl with thick arms and waist and everything
And stringy blonde hair and startled blue eyes
Stood by her bed and silently the tears dripped down
Again and again, the first time was the hardest.
Her father stood next to her, wearing thin, clutching both their hands.
She stirred, the withering woman in the bed,
And hope painted their faces before dying in their eyes;
Smiles still plastered to their teeth.

I remember her best on a perfect January day, years and years ago,
When things were alright, before I knew she was sick,
Her feet buried in the sand, palm trees swaying in the background
Explaining the complex lives of sea turtles to me
In a blue and green bikini, greying hair, thick sunglasses
And that straight scar drawn down her chest,
A thick ridge, a wound opened and reopened too many times;
Making her heart tick-tick instead of beat-beat.

If she dies I will never forgive her doctors.
Too much medication kills you fast as any poison,
But they trust too much in the dose,
And focus on the numbers on the screen
Rather than the fear in our eyes,
Rather than the fading tick-tick of her heart,
Refusing to listen even when they began to make severe mistakes,
And that's where these cataclysmic months started.
The ICU is fatal. It breeds hopelessness
And plants the first temptations of suicide.

Today I am a crumpled can.
I am a satsuma left to shrivel in the sun.
I am a star gone supernova,
I implode, cave into myself
With a kind of sick brilliance.

In my holocaust of thought,
There is no peace.
There is only war.
There are only battles to be won.
I am no longer allowed to lose this race.

Normally my veins are filled with blood,
But today it is octane and oxygen
Chemicals clashing and consuming me in flame.
I am luminescent with disease.
My skin glows bright with fear.

Inside my skull, something is raging.
I keep my head down, cast my eyes to the ground,
Concentrate on forward movement.
I cannot think for all that sadness and fear.
I didn't know my eyes could hold so many tears.

Today, I am a crumpled can, a satsuma left to rot.
I sit on the sidelines and wait for my walls to give in.

This was us,
Back before the world turned to ****,
Before high school invaded and told us
We probably wouldn't ever be happy,
Back before that long cold November,
In the days we were sure she'd come home,
When we thought everything would be fine;
Before the sickness claimed another
To come and take her place in the ranks of the dead.

No. This was the day when
We placed chains of daisies on our heads
And declared ourselves the kings and queens over everything,
Said we would rove the world over,
Then raced, screaming, into the Puget Sound,
And laughed as the freezing salt flooded our lungs;
The day we lay in the firelight and toasted Starbursts
And let our laughter loose to join with the smoke and float
Up through the hole in the roof of the longhouse to mingle forever
With the naked San Juan summer.

This was us.
Back then, we could've lived forever.

I wish I could say all the things I think about you
But I can't. There's a social faux pas and besides
How do you put heartache into words
While staring into someone's eyes?
It's easy to say that I love you
From a hundred and two miles away,
But I don't know what I'd do
If I was right there, right now with you
Sitting in your car, screaming along
With bad renditions of 80's love songs
It's all very well to call you on the phone
And tell you that I miss you
That my heart is breaking for you
While alone in my room with the door locked
But if I had to tell it to the world,
I don't know that I could,
I don't think that I would.
I wish I could tell you all the things I think about you
But the problem is I'm not so sure that I mean them.

El mundo es falso, y las sonrisas son falsas.
Todos los días en que vivimos es simplemente pintado,
Nadie lo quiere decir más.
A todos nos causan nuestros propios problemas.
En algún lugar de su inicio, hacia atrás y hacia atrás y hacia atrás-
Una palabra desagradable, un retorcido pensamiento-
Y ahora es el caos.

Si, de alguna manera, yo podría dispersar las sombras del mundo
Y soportar todo el peso para usted, lo haría.
Me harìa llevar todo el sufrimiento del mundo en mis hombros
Para la humanidad. Ahora lo sé eso.
No puedo creer que alguna vez fui tan egoísta
Para derramar una sola lágrima por mí mismo.
Yo podía soportarlo. Yo podría tomar en el mundo
Si eso significa que ninguno de ustedes tenía que sentir que el dolor por más tiempo.

Se amo incondicionalmente.

honey, no one is an actor.
we're just people stepping into others' lives
the stage lights help
they burn out your fear and give your sweat a source.

honey, no one deserves it.
you're not born with it, you grow into it,
you don't guide it
you let it guide you. you do what is natural and what is true.

honey, i may not show it
but my skin is a silken cage
full to bursting with butterflies with razor-blade wings.
i just don't let it get to me.

honey, don't you get it?
theater, and the arts as a whole, it's life
it's blood and sweat and breath
don't say it's not your "thing" and don't say you've never done this before
you do it every day
every step you take forward is action and reaction
every word you speak has festered in your mind,
memorized for centuries and just waiting to be free.

and all that matters is
if at the end of the day your heart's not in it
wholly and completely, doesn't matter how well you acted,
you've failed.
and if your heart is in it, all of it,
wholly and completely and unbiased and unashamed,
doesn't matter if you skipped a page and a half
(the audience hasn't got the script memorized)
they'll see your passion and they'll know
you've won.

Henry says you can’t write poems about whales.
It’s too obscure a metaphor, the biology of behemoths
Is too exact. Too much science going on.

I like whales. The smooth dorsal curves of their fat bodies
Arching and twisting towards the depths,
The salt spray of their powerful breath,
And their positively massive hearts;
They understand that they are great
Yet there is something still more awesome than they.
There’s more mystery and poetry to biology than people would like.
Especially realists. Life isn’t straightforward and they hate it.
We have some very basic, very general patterns that we follow,
But they’re far too broad to say ‘always’ ever.
Every rule, every law, has been or will be broken.
And the world will keep on turning (until the day it doesn’t),
And the whales will keep on swimming (until the day they don’t).

Henry says you can’t write poetry about whales.
I don’t like Henry very much. I think he’s wrong.

Some days it feels like I’ll never get my life
sorted out.
I want to be a writer,
but I hardly ever write
anymore.
And I want to be a scientist,
but where do I start?
There is so much I want to do
so much I want to see
and I have to start deciding
now?

Everyone wants me to be
successful, or happy,
but neither of these things mean
anything at all to me anymore.
Neither of them are important.
I often feel like
I have a
destiny
like I’m meant for something
great and important and huge
like I’ll rattle the stars someday
but
how do I do that?

I don’t want
to have to run away
with a mad man
in a blue box
to make my simple life
matter.
And some days
I don’t want to matter
at all -
I don’t want anyone
to trust me or rely on me
I don’t want to be
responsible
for anyone or anything.

I have spent
so much of my life
so horribly alone -
watching others’ lives go past,
sitting on the sidelines
as they orchestrate and control
their little worlds.
Did they not ever feel
that miserable soul-ache,
did the fear
that none of it mattered
never press down on them
and threaten
to take it all away?

Did they never
look up at the stars
and scream at nothing
and have no one listen
and have no one care?

I have lived alone
and I have lived together
with others
and we all feel alone sometimes,
some of us more than most.
Happiness for me
is no longer an option
and I don’t care at all
about any standards of success
but if I can make you
feel less alone,
even for one second,
then I have done all I can,
I have rattled the stars
to their very cores,
my life has mattered
so very much.
I have been incredibly,
insanely, unbelievably
important.

How elegant the sunshine seems
as the rain pours down on the earth!
What luminous and golden beams
shower the Southern world with mirth!

How excellent, in retrospect,
is Summer's passing glance;
how gorgeously do we reflect
upon our August dance!

Yet Winter soon will claim her own
with snow and cold grey ice,
and how I long to see my home
gleaming with the frozen lights!

Summer's a lover in a golden crown,
But Winter's a goddess in a silver shroud.

woe to those who live
without passion,
who their whole lives have walked
inside the lines
who live in one, straightforward
black and white world;
who, even in their rejoicing,
wear monotones on their breath;
who have never wandered
and have not found their way;
who have never fought -
they must not have anything worth fighting for.

it’s not so hard, right?
you ask the poet to put her thoughts
her feelings, the images in her head
down on paper.
it should be easy! she does this
every day. this is her job.
this is her life, her life’s blood.

so why won’t the words come?
why does my heart feel stopped
in my chest, why won’t my fingers
move in rhythm with my mind?
and i want to scream,
i want to, i want to tear things apart,
but the world is fragile enough
already and the only way i can
hurt without hurting
is with words
and i don’t
have
any.

Tigers, he said, and pointed a shaking hand
East and off into the jungle where
Through all the darkness shed by trees,
Emerged the tigers, their bodies cast
In regal orange, black and white,
Reflecting over shifting sinews.

The could have taken the village easily-
Any man could have. But they didn't.
Instead they lived among us, like some kind of protection,
Sleeping across our doorways and leaving in twos
To hunt. They never attacked us though,
They seemed to understand this place belonged to humans.
I don't think they wanted it anyway.

They didn't stay long, the tigers.

I guess they missed the jungle.

I climb to the top of the mountain; it takes my breath away.
The pain in my lungs in my throat in my legs, it's all worth it
For that one sunrise or sunset or view or just sky and sky and sky,
Stretching up and up, farther than the eye can see, farther than the soul can reach.
The thorns in my feet from the desert trees are beautiful.
They let me know the sun has not won, there is still something stronger.
A red umbrella on a city street. Architecture, the wonderful kind,
The kind you can smell and taste and touch, endless interlocking triangles,
Windows that reflect and multiply and kaleidoscope the clouds.

Today, however, someone tells me that beauty is something different.
I am supposed to find it in photographs, in one immobile two-dimensional perspective.
Yes, the girl with the ruby lips has perfect proportions and smooth skin.
Yes, the waterfall is tall and the spray makes a thousand rainbows.
Yes, the black lines on the white page contrast perfectly, dramatically.
Beauty is a three-dimensional thing, an experience.
I am supposed to find it in photographs?

I love your laugh because it is imperfect;
Because your skin is freckled, your body less than impressive,
Your face disproportionately skewed when you smile,
Because you exist outside and beyond three dimensions,
You are beautiful.
So many things can be erased in photographs, like context
And subtext and imperfections. To take a photograph and make it perfect
Is to lie. I don't want to lie to you. I don't want you to lie to me.
Stop living life through a camera lens. Take off your rose-colored glasses and just see.

i told you that i dreamed about you
and that's more truth than
i've ever told anyone,
but still i held back.

i said i was a queen
and you were my knight
and together we brought our world
into a new age of light

which i wish could be our truth.
i'd love to rule the world with you.

but where i was a queen,
you were my only conquest,
my bloodied hands, rough
from fire and from fight
mapped out your skin
traced the lines of your collarbones,
danced over your veins

my lips played connect-the-dots
with your freckles
my words healed your scars
together we devoured one another:
and i woke up guilty.

because that's not where we belong.
we should be in the story
i told you: a queen
and her champion,
beating back the armies of night.

if it's meant to happen,
it will.
but do not think this means
you get to sit
on your *** all day,
waiting for Fate.
Fate's here.
Time's now.
do something about it
disturb the universe
swirl the stars
and they will dance for you

life is good and long
and there are risks
well worth taking
your days
on this green earth
are numbered.
make them count.

they say
plant your fingertips against something
solid and concentrate on what is at hand
but all I have been able to see behind my eyelids
for many months is your face
and the wood resounds with the beating of your heart

love is a sad kind of trouble
for, knowing what its like to
exist unwavering in perfect happiness,
I have the days I have to fake my way through it.

Plant your fingertips against something solid and concentrate.
I put my hands on your heart, I focus on your rhythm.