[a poem on poetry and on writing; dedicated to af]*

Sometimes,
a noisy silence,
like hunger,
fulfills me.

Those times,
I seat in a porch,
in the bluish mist of dawn
or in the rust of falling skies,

and I wander,
looking at thousands of words
floating in my porch,
dancing in a slight breeze,
like a thousand glassy hummingbirds.

Charmed,
I pick one
and another
and suddenly
in a swirl
an all flock
gathers
and its brilliance
draws what
I do not know.

Strange realms
rise
as the swirl of wings
fades away.
I enter these new worlds
and
I see.

Entering survival mode.

Feed upon your remaining heart.
Attention:
use leftovers parsimoniously.

Take that one everlasting memory.

Stage a friend, a dearest one.

Plunge into poetry.

Take a deep breath.

Remember all the words
in a myriad of fairy worlds.

Acknowledge:
nothing left to say.

Acknowledge:
no one in the distance.

Exit survival mode.

I learned to live loosely, lovingly and loudly. Loving every loose moment of every loud life living around me.
Leaving light lingering on grounds and sky like leaves leaving in the fall I left before life decided to leave me.
I left to look for a love to lean on for life, and for myself to loan a moment to live for.
To listen, to long for, just long enough to look like a sky-lit sunbeam.
The loquacious levity of the life lasting around me lived lividly, keeping its eyes open, looking for lucidity.

You walk down the street,
You said you won't be long.
But as the hours pass by,
They don't notice your gone.

The rain falls down hard,
Freezing you to the core.
Try to block out the words;
Rude. Dumb. *****.

Words echo in your head,
Each causing you more pain.
Getting away from the hurt
Is worth a little rain.

You sit on a bench
In the dark all alone,
Remembering the days
When this place felt like home.

You wonder what changed,
How they think this is right.
Wondering if they worried
When you left home tonight.

You walk down the street,
You said you won't be long.
But you left with your things,
And you're forever gone.

He didn't have the ***** to kiss me. His mouth was too busy asking for things I wasn't ready to give.
He didn't have the ***** to kiss me, but begged me to come into his house so he could **** me.
He didn't have the ***** to kiss me, but he had the ***** to ask if he could film it.
He didn't have the ***** to kiss me, but had the courage to grab my arm and try and drag me in.
(The bruises faded)
He didn't have the ***** to kiss me, but he confessed the only position he knew was doggy.
Ironic, because I was never a girlfriend to him. I was a set of *******. A pair of legs. Full lips, a tongue, and all he wanted was between my thighs.
Never a girlfriend, always an object. An animal. A toy.

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because, in one of the

spun sugar fragile sequences of the events in your life, it works

out. There is a place, somewhere amidst star stuff and cosmic

collisions, where you are not the problem daughter or the

biggest disappointment or the most regretted kiss. There is a

place where you sink into a desk in your eight a.m. class and

a boy with bags under his eyes and a hole-y sweater pulled

over his knuckles says, "hi." There is a place where your father

comes back from the war with sand grit in his eyes, blood

under his fingernails and lets you save him.  There is a place

where you live in India, where you aren't afraid to love, where

everything hurts less, where you stopped punishing yourself for

the faults of your parents. You are a girl. Not a dart board or a guilty

verdict or the final, desperate ****** of a sword through

someone's chest. You are made of the same stuff as Marie

Antoinette and Catherine the Great and Elizabeth, and you

can command the winds too. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight because no one ever asked you about the scars on your

thighs but that doesn't make them nonexistent or unimportant.

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because you've grown:

stronger in some ways and weaker in others, but you are still

a result of rhapsodies in violet and trees bowed to the sea

and soldiers with wind burn on their cheeks. Tonight, you are

going to wrap your own arms around your own chest and

breathe, swaying silently to no music. You are going to

memorize the sound of silence, and you are going to listen hard

for the even, jagged, pitter patter of your heart. You are going

to thank your body for waging war against itself, you are going

to apologize to your head for bruising your heart. You are going

to feel the roughness of the floor and the vastness of the entire

world and all of the eventualities spread before you. You are

going to remember that this is only one, that atoms and

molecules are flighty, whimsical, prone to selfishness and

longing for the promise of stability. You are going to press your

lips to your own wrists and know, as surely as Anne Boleyn

knew when she walked to the guillotine, that no one can save

you but yourself. You aren't going to **** yourself tonight

because you are not an accident of the multiverse. You are

purposeful and beautiful and young and reckless with your

feelings, but you are not a mistake. Listen to the trembling

of your heartbeat and breathe. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight.

Love, love,
Or lack thereof
Rules my life so far.
But someday soon,
I'll find the moon,
To match my every star.