This is the year of the search party
The year we stop looking for the answers
The year our inner commotion
Winds down to a clockwork steady

The year where everything is okay
Because it is
Because you are not your lame job
And you are not your last semester
And you are not your bills piling up

You are the moment your lungs erupt
A steady stream of your own breath
Taste it like biting cold
Or cigarettes
Feel it like a mudslide on your own skin

Let it go

Let it go like the millions of choices you can make today
Let every choice you have ever made fall away
So that you may take a moment to be satisfied right now

Assume you had no other options
And because you had no other options
Where you are is where you were meant to be

This is the year made easy
The year the search party found the answers
And hand delivered you note

The year you are a nuclear reactor
Every time you stand still
Feel the hum of your breath
As it fills up your chest
And you get so hot
The snow bending your branches melts away

The year you do not still yourself because of your anchors
You still yourself to watch them fall away

This is the year you make peace with the past

Be in the moment
Make this the year of forgiveness
And the year of less stress
The year you shake hands with your vices
The year of really good ***

The year the search party stopped
And you walked away
Dropped all your gear
Because what you found was a mirror
And it felt like you saw yourself for the first time
Because you did

Because there are no answers
Because every choice you have ever made brought you here
And right here is where you were meant to be

Underneath the burning building in my gut
So much is preserved safely
In the memory where you are smiling
I find peace
I want to be lonely in private
But there is no space for that

Under the rubble
Compound fracture of bitter jawline
That same smile a photo
Warping in fire

I want to preserve you
Like a wasp in amber

But we are not as slow as that
Not as gentle

The theory is
Two objects fall at the same speed
Regardless of mass
Except for people
We do not fall for each other at the same pace

I felt like the man with the rescue dog
That heard your heartbeat
After the cement settled
And the wood grew cold
White ash
Black cinderblock paperweights
Your body preserved under
Layers of broken building
But you felt safe
Because you set the fire

And I was the man that found you
Some secrets can’t stay buried

We were cave people
Found and revived

I’m not new to this
Just rusty
Just dusty
There are burn marks on our bodies
And I have almost forgotten how mine got there

There were things you thought you should go back for
Things you wanted to leave behind
But in the saving you took what you could carry
There was baggage in your desperation
To save what you thought was important

When you burnt yourself to the ground
You forgot that fire is a funny thing
It lives too
And you can’t control it

There were some houses
Left standing
Whole acres unlit for no reason

Not everything gets burned

And there is a photo of you
Cigarette hole dimples
A smile that brings me peace

And you brought with you
Bits of burning ribcage
And smoke filled lung
To hide your heart minimally

I brought nothing
Mine is slightly weather calloused now
But it works just fine
It’s just rusty
Just dusty

So take this
What is left of my burning breast plate
Carved message on the inside
like an oversized locket
Underneath the black and white negative of your film strip

“Thank you for trying”

Who am I?
Not name
Not address
Not occupation
Not body
Not thought
In an instant I can open my eyes
And take you in
And know what is in front of me
And that you are beautiful
And it would take days
For the voice in my head to describe what is in front of me
I am not that voice
I am that instant
I am a series of instants
I am constantly changing indescribable awareness
That feels
I feel **** sometimes
I write poetry
I am poetry
Read this again once I am dead
Feel me?
Feel me
I dare you

Part 1
My third car broke down
All that metal
It will outlive me

I’ve been jogging to work
Taking the back ways of a neighborhood
I barely know

Yesterday morning
I took pictures
A modern day romantic

A pack of camels followed by
A pack of Marlboro silvers
The cellophane glittered with dew
It will outlive me

A sunset behind a church
Sunsets will outlive me

A shopping cart next to the church sign
The grocery store is very far from here
I imagine it belonged to a homeless man
He found this spot and was saved
The art of being saved will outlive me

Broken glass
I want to touch it
Leave my blood upon it
I want to glue each piece
To form a ball
And hang it from a nearby tree
So that it may own the morning sunlight
Reflect it like small miracles
Some parts red
That glass will outlive me

A dead rabbit
Mostly bone now
That rabbit did not outlive me
I feel good about that

There was also a woman walking her dog
We passed by a tree at the same time
She and the dog were old
She would not let me take her picture
So I took one of the tree
She and the dog will not outlive me
I don’t feel good about that
Part2
This facebook status will outlive me
And I feel like a caveman
Scrawling poetry on cave walls
In an attempt to be remembered forever

I want to place my hand upon your belly
And bite my lips
So I can spit blood
Like a human can of spraypaint
The outline
So you cannot forget what my own touch looked like

You
May not outlive me
And I may not outlive you
All we have is now

All we have is now

“You look like my son,” he says.
But he does not look at my face
He looks over my head and out the window

It is the look of a man that while drunk
He has kicked his dog in the ribs
Because he can

But now he is sober
And can’t really look at it anymore

I understand that look
And run my own fingers along my side

I wonder
If he still has the rain in is breath
And as if to answer my question
His chin quivers
He fixes his glasses

“How old is your son now?” I ask

“We’re both old men now, ” he says

I give him his change
52 cents
And two plastic bags

“Happy Birth-
“Merry Christmas I mean.”
Merry Christmas I say

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