Too many people have forgotten how to dance
Their bodies have become stiff with
Everyday life
They are checking their watch and carrying their briefcases even when they are not

You can see the worry in their bones

They move the most in their sleep, when their bodies fight themselves -
angrily restless at night because they are locked up during the day
Their arms are more like pipes than wings
Their legs are simply part of the machine that allows them to count

Their faces are clocks
Their hands are levers
And their hearts? -
Buried - somewhere beneath the flesh that has become less than flesh, the muscle that is less than muscle, the bone that is less than bone and
The blood that has become simply something to pump -
Something to keep from
drying
out
completely.

I heard a harmonica the other day-
My body heard it before my ears did
My arms listened so closely- my hips and my knees followed and the
Air stepped aside for my body
creating a tunnel of space without space for my limbs only
The grass below my feet was my stage and the earth and I were no longer separate

When I left,
A stranger told me
“You’re a great dancer”
I should have told him
“So is everyone else-

You just have to let your fingertips to reach for the notes as they hear them
You just have to train your heart to understand more than lists-
They don’t matter now – They didn’t ever

If there is a God,
I don’t think his intention in creating bodies was for them to worry
Perhaps our fingers weren’t made to always be holding something
Perhaps our eyes are in the front of our head for a reason
And perhaps our hearts are inside of our chest because who know what would happen if we
Let them out

If you left me anywhere,
I’d rather it be the mountains-
There with the wildflowers and dirt and running water-
There with the trees.

The trees that are my brothers and sisters, and father and mother
When I am near them, I inhale knowing breathing is more than it is,
I know I am close to home
The trees that spoke to me by swaying,
Threatening to fall but instead
They raised me

Those same trees taught me how to breathe and how to love,
They re-teach me each time I forget.
They open their palms to me, show me the value of this fragmented moment-
I do my best to get lost in them when I can.

When my heart hurts,
They surround me
They remind me that no ache is so great as the immensity of their trunks,
No worry as significant as the weight of their branches,
No earthly pain could ever amount to the detail found in just one of their leaves-
A beautiful, browning pine needle,
Fallen to the drying forest floor.

We used to have contests to see who could make the best nests in each other’s hair.
Naturally, your nests were award winning-
We’d emerge from bed, spent and re-born
And in the mirror, an applauding crowd of spectators stood standing along our satisfied, flushed reflections.

Those nests would take eons to untangle-
Partly, because honestly –they were ridiculous.
How in the hell did you move so fast as to sculpt worlds from strings on my scalp?
Partly, because they were funny, and it is a small, rare delight to look in a mirror and know the smile across is actually two,
But mostly because, truly- I was quite fond of the fingers that made them-
Ungraceful, to be sure
But some of the best imperfections I’ve known.

I remember the days when the moon was following me
La Luna,
You were everywhere and always so beautiful
What were you trying to tell me by appearing brighter in my sky,
Than in others?

La Luna,
You visited me in my dreams each night
You fell towards me but I never felt afraid.
I mistook you for the earth,
And the earth for you.
You are everywhere,
And always so beautiful

La Luna,
I want to have you with me all the time
To balance the strange that is these scars.
I wish to carry you in the palm of my hand and roll you around in my fingertips
So that I may always be reminded that beauty and ugly can live side by side
And one wouldn’t exist without the other

I’ve tried to reach out and touch you,
In my dreams I cup my hands underneath the sky and say
“I’m ready whenever you are,”
waiting for You and the stars to land in my fingers
so that I may arrange my own constellations tonight –
my index finger sliding stars around wherever I so choose.
I might make a constellation of the smiling face of God,
So that all of those people down below have something to really look at…
But isn’t that what the stars are, anyway?

I might make a constellation so jumbled that it becomes whatever whoever is looking up at it needs it to become
Sometimes,
Stars just need to be stars
And sometimes,
The moon is just the moon

But  I still wonder
La Luna
How you are everywhere
And always so beautiful
What are you trying to tell me by appearing brighter in my sky,
Than in others’?

The time on the oven says it’s almost four in the morning,
Lit up that neon green that only microwaves and ovens seem to know.
We are in my best friends kitchen without the lights on,
The window is open and the early morning’s air whispers goose bumps onto my forearms.
It is after wine and everyone else has gone to sleep, Quiet,
And we try to stifle our giggling, but not too hard. You ask me if I want to dance,
So.
We waltz in our socks from the linoleum to the carpet, swaying with the melody of the radiator and the harmony of our own jokes.
Your hand is strong holding mine,
Your torso quivers as you laugh.
Finally,
We tire.
You’re wearing Statue of David boxers,
And I watch you as you sleep.
I look to you,
then to the doorway with that tiny wooden cross above it, and back to you again
before I fall asleep-
still dancing.

It is autumn again, finally.
The air in my lungs makes me wonder -
how many lives have we lived before, the exact same way,
and how are we still so confused.

It is the season of wondering and wandering.
I feel my heart more now than ever before.
It begs me to notice it is there,
and I will not forget.

What it is so full of,
I do not know,
but I am slowly learning of the fragility of the
human condition.

We are wondering and wandering,
and occasionally the two coincide.

Tonight, the sky watches us:
The old couple that has become comfortable with not speaking,
but simply offering each other's company on a bench outside a bookstore.
The young couple who are excited over which table to sit at,
who talk about nothing but really they talk about everything.
The people who walk alone.
The ones who smile,
and the ones who don't.
The people who miss their mothers
and the ones who are still learning how.

Tonight, we are so blessed
and the cold whispers something about how we are all confused -
this is okay.
Our hearts beg us to be noticed, friends,

Listen.

If we were all as romantic as we'd like to be,
we could meet our future spouses here.
Instead,
we wait.

We are a moving room full of
strangers
an in-transit nation consisting of
empty spaces.

We are all reading the paper in our own way
Our minds are somewhere else but here on these
plastic, carpeted seats

Lately, my heart hurts.
My bones are anxious.
I just want to run,
I possess all of the energy of the sun, and yet,
I sleep.

My soul searches for something more than this empty space,
than this
bus full of strangers too afraid to introduce themselves.
This is monotony.
The hollowness of it eats at my thoughts like maggots at a corpse.

Soon there will be nothing left

Was there anything to begin with?