I heard your voice thru my desperate screams
So I clawed thru my ravaged soul
Just to stand by your side
I admired my own carnage
And handed you my heart

As I stood in a room with death today, she spoke of meaningful things. Peace and life and love and loss.  She grabbed my hand and said "do not rush to me, for I will meet you at your time.  Stop giving your power to the little things and don't let them tell you you're blind. Your cross, your bag, your little flag have no meaning with me. What comes is your soul, the spirit inside, that's all that I can see. For I am nothing to fear as long as you've known yourself. When your time comes accept my hand and leave proud of what you have done."  

My advice to you, as it was given to me, is to honor your soul inside. It's what was here before and all that will be left after to join the earth we come from. I shared the air and touched the skin of death today and saw how much life there is.  Don't waste your time feeling lost, just choose your path.  Don't judge the face or body in the mirror, for it is a literal shell that you do not keep. Cultivate who you are inside like a newly planted seed, and when your time comes, leave being a mighty tree to be given back to Mother Earth.

I fear that I shall die without ever being truly known.
As the autumn nears I pull more into myself
Carrying my bleeding beating heart in my open palm blood dripping between my fingers and down my wrist
Droplets disappearing into the earth
Desperately holding myself in
Feeling my fingernails claw at my insides
My soul begging to be let out
To be free.
This is the harvest of what I have sown
This is the ultimate Autumn
The forever alone

The moon is beautiful tonight.
Full like the womb of a mother.
Growing and giving life.
Waiting to birth a new cycle.
Cycles that change the tides.
Wash away the old.
Birth in the new.
The moon is radiant and glowing.
Spreading light in the darkest of moments.
She exists so we know we are never lost.
She births hope.
Regeneration.
Cycles.
The moon is beautiful tonight.

I wonder who I would be if I had never been told to stop singing so loudly.
Melodies and lyrics that used to come from my heart filling my chest until they fell from my mouth dancing around my tongue.
Belted out loudly because I wanted the earth to know that I could hear her songs and wanted to offer my voice so everyone else could hear too.
What if it had been understood that I was coping with the separation from my mother and loss of my father?
Would I speak more freely now?
Would my throat open instead of shut down and deny that I ever knew how to sing?
Would my hum be a roar?

Who would I be if I had been encouraged to continue to paint?
Continually inspired to find expression in color and shape.
Reminded that the mysterious blots always created some type of magnificence.
How much more free would my soul be if the color spectrum had not been drained from my childhood world?
Placed with a family that didn't believe in nature, or color, or freedom.  
Forced into black and white with not even gray.  
Would I still be dripping and swiping across a blank canvas and know how to pull colors from emptiness?
Would I be unafraid?

How much stronger would I be if I hadn't been told to be quiet when my insides were screaming that something was wrong?
Would my boundaries be stronger?
Would my voice be louder?
How much space would I be comfortable taking up if I hadn't been taught to cower?

How much more open would my heart and comfort be if motherhood had not been torn away?
If I had never been told I wasn't enough?
Or I was too young?
What if motherhood had not been taken from my arms while milk dripped from my ******* and my heart was all I was allowed to send with him?
No one asks about the birth mom...they just move on because she's a vessel for someone else's happiness.
What if I had been supported?
Would it be easier to feel close to
Or good enough for my children now?
Would I feel unafraid of being accepted by them?
Would I tear myself apart less?
Would I not worry they'd be better off with my partner if something happened to me?  Or to us?
No one ever asks about that story.
Not even when they see their own children and understand that kind of love.
They never see how fragile I was left.  
How heartbroken.
No one has ever been careful around me.

What if my strength, independence, spirit, voice, or intelligence, had been respected?
What if I had been celebrated and pushed into that growth?
What if I hadn't been held down or been too much?
What if my fire had been tended?

Who would I be if I hadn't been the only one to hold onto me?

He doesn't like to be noticed but he's impossible to miss and impossible to hang on to.  
You can't tie someone like him down.  
He'd chew off his arm in what you'd perceive as self sabotage,
but for him it's survival.
His freedom is what brings him home to you at night.
Maybe not consecutively but he always come back....always.
All the reasons you come to hate him, resent him, miss him are all the reasons you loved him in the first place.
You loved his intoxicating freedom.
You loved that you could smell it on him.
You loved that when he was close enough
you felt like it was yours.
So you tried to hold him tighter.
Convinced that if you could just make him love you enough he'd stay
Missing that he was loving you as much as he could.
So instead you began killing him.
Resenting him for not being what you needed, even when he was all you ever wanted.
Slowly...watching him die without even realizing it.
Yelling at him.
Screaming at him.
Begging him.
Cursing him.
Causing him to hate who he is because it makes him "broken".
Hating that the pull within him is too strong for him to deny
Breaking his own heart because it was too broken to just love you the way you wanted to be loved
but he loved you...
By the time he had eaten away at half his arm you expected the pain would be too much for him to bare so he'd stay.
Only to watch him run on 3 legs crying out into the night.
Singing her song that called to his being.
He is the wolf.
And she is his moon.
Not even the sea can resist her call.
How on earth could it be expected of he?

His pull was undeniable by her
She felt it across the vastness

I wanted you to know
But I wasn't allowed to say it
Years had passed
We'd both moved on
Life changed
As it does
But the constant
The thing I've never said aloud
Just kept it quietly tucked away
Locked in a little box within my heart
The one I've written about time and again
The one I hope you read about
Hope that you still have the key
It holds all of our moments
All of the beautiful things that make you
The one I just couldn't forget

His words peel off the page
The way I imagine he'd remove my clothing
Intense
Tender
Passionate
Verse that pulls me under like the current
Of an ****** on the verge

Tantalizing my extremities

I remember that night not vividly, but excitedly.
Awakened by his wildness, his quiet freedom, his lack of care.  
I remember watching him maneuver between structures like an animal uncomfortable being confined by anything man-made.  
Cautious, watching, going after only what it needs.
I remember feeling his scent through my entire body.
Each inhale filled with adrenaline and abandon that dripped into my lungs making my heart pound.
I remember him peering at me through a curtain of thick black lashes.  
Accentuating fierce almond brown eyes with golden tones reminiscent of the sunsets we'd both known so well.
The moment he was close, my skin piqued with the heat of the desert that ran through our bloods.
His hands gliding across my back freeing my ******* in a snap before his mouth demanded to be met.
I remember being lifted onto a cool metal work table only for a moment before incandescently melting into the scorching ****** of him.
Holding on and letting go.
Riding his freedom.
Tasting his heat.
Feeling his wild.
Losing the me this world sees
Liquifying into the connectedness
Of the memories of we both craved
What we both ached for.
Becoming the sand and the sky
The red earth and painted desert
Our heated breath amplifying into thunderous purple clouds.
Sweat dripping down our bodies like a craved desert rain.
Until the monsoon took us over and left us quivering.
Relishing in the freedom.
The wild....
I think there might have been music playing somewhere in the background that we laughed about later...but I can't remember for sure.

I sat on the cold floor of my bedroom somewhere around 3am

Why is it always some ungodly hour with poets?

Anyway, I sat on my cold bedroom floor
Scribing of words about you, of course...

...They're always about you...

...Scribbles of words
Crumpled up into *****
Because nothing ever seems to come out right
The words don't fit

Your beauty
The depth of my love for you
How I ache for the loss of you...

...How you're the worst person that could ever exist for sending me to this hell of emotion on my bedroom floor at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Start again...

Can't you hear them?
The screaming
The madness
The fear

Like a knocking at your brain
Demanding to be heard
Can't you hear them?

Their voices
Reaching like hands from the grave
Ready to pull you under
Into tumultuous rage

Clothes shredding beneath fingernails
Wraiths twisted faces
Staring you cold with empty eyes

They don't even bother to hide
They wait beside the bed
Not having the consideration
To be beneath it

Can't you hear them?
Circling around and around
Until bile threatens to expel

Make it stop
Make it stop
Quiet the torture
This dizzying torment

Can't you hear them?
These monsters beyond the veil

I felt for the warmth of your palm against the doorknob gone cold
Searched out your fingerprints etched into the dust
Crisp leaves had made their home in the foyer
Crunching under foot
Listening for the steps to be yours
The hearth gone quiet...cold
These memories of you
Surviving in our eternal Autumn

Come sit lost knight
At the table for ghosts
Draped in webbed memories
Of victory and battle
Clandestine glances
Bloom and blush long buried
Delicate sighs of ladies
Echoing in the ether
Ghostly kings reminiscing of laughter
Wearing robes of sorrow
Lifting silver cups
To lurid lips
Vapored fingers touching life now gone
Come sit lost knight
At the table for ghosts
Where we dine on shadows
Entombed in time

Sometimes I still miss my father
I daydream of what his words might have been
I imagine that he is having a conversation with me
Or that he's painting with my sons
Maybe teaching them how to fix a car
Or build a motorcycle
I envision him sitting around the living room
Or kitchen table
Maybe sitting out back with us having his morning coffee
Caught up in one of the many
Indigenous people's issues we talk about regularly
My father who always claimed he was born to the wrong body
He was meant to be a native man
He'd been saying it since he was 6 years old, his mother tells me
That's why he was only ever with indigenous women
I picture his smile
His laugh
What his movements might have looked like
I don't question whether or not he'd be proud of me
I know that answer
I do wonder if it ever makes him sad that he can't be here
He can't interact with his grandchildren
or me
or my husband
this family that he always wanted
He can only watch through that impossibly thin veil
Sometimes I can feel when he's near
Occasionally that makes it harder
Sometimes I even feel him and my father in law together
Hanging out like a couple of old native guys
Laughing at our craziness
Shaking their heads at us
Wishing we knew how close they were to us
We're almost at another Autumn Equinox
The veil is getting thin
I always feel them when it's like this
So incredibly close
Separated by nothing more than a veil

Let's have more of those safe conversations
You know the ones
Where we talk about music and writing
The ones that an onlooker would think are meaningless

Let's have more talks of coffee
And games
Of the weather

Let's have more talks of nothings
The ones where each word
Unfolds into another language

The language of great poets
The ones that capture the broken
With blunt eloquence
The ones that describe the desire
With the sharpest point of their pen

Let's revel in the riveting
The poignant
The masters of poetry

Let's have more safe conversations
Because we talk of the most unsafe of nothings

Television show memories
Memories of a lover
That lover that seemed like they held the potential of forever
Deep gazing eyes that said everything and nothing because it was all felt inside
Gentle featherlight strokes along the lines of each other's body
Allowing your fingertips to build memories of warmth
Muscle
Smoothness
Scent
Followed by the build up of hands that can't grab enough fast enough
Kissing scenes that capture the passion you once knew
Kisses that could barely contain the desire
Deep breath kisses that took in their entire essence
Taking quivering pause to look again into their eyes
That slight smile before demanding their mouth again
Desperate to have as much of them in you as possible
So you could hold onto fleeting moments and
Commit them to memory where they could live forever
These shows carry us to lands we've never been to
And still we recreate that magical relationship
It remains perfect and pure
Passionate
A fire that forever smolders
Because for a time, you were that show
In any part of world
It wouldn't matter because you could've been anywhere
In anytime
And it was with them
So it was everything
You just didn't expect the episode to end so soon

Fingertips like paintbrushes
Leaving beautiful pictures
Of gentle memories across skin
Sweet sunrise glances
Glimpsing futures forever wondered
Moon rise illuminating beautiful secrets
Middle of night to find you awake
No words spoken
Crickets and bugs speak for us
Arms under yours
Warmth the embrace
To never be forgotten
Time is jealous
Thought it had its way
A thousand days
A thousand years
Does not matter
Silence and tender sighs
Our dismay
Kept in tiny boxes filled with jeweled hypotheticals
Words never said
Time never spent
Hidden in a thousand different places
Over hundreds of different galaxies
Twinkling little stars
Too far to reach
Those pieces...pieces of you and me
Gravitate
Assimilate
Dust to form
Out there...
In the darkness
Where it should be
And the light from us will flourish
Live forever
In dreams
In dark
In life
In death
In love
In loss
Always
We'll never perish
Like the stars in the sky

You know there's more.  
There's always more.
He doesn't say them.
I don't say them.
Somehow we still manage to say all and nothing.
Each relying on our intuition to translate.
Both depending on the conveyance to be clear.

I hope it is.
Does he hope it is?
****...confusion

I hear it though.
The questions in the questions.
I think he hears the answers in the answers.
Always this language of in between.

In between....
Star crossed.
That's what it is.
Some ethereal cosmic fate.

Reason, reason...
Fingers tapping as I think on it....
Because life is not meant to be *******
Because you are meant to feel and be inspired
Because you are...
Because.....
Because........

Because sometimes it's just nice to have someone out there in all of existence that pays attention to the way you like your coffee for no good reason other than it's the way YOU like your coffee.

Because if I asked him the time and date of whatever
Or how many blueberries were in the box sitting on the table that one time we ate breakfast together...how many years ago now??
And he remembers.
And memory is all we're left with
When everything else is gone

You can be remembered for so many big things
But he remembers how I take my coffee
And that little tiny thing
Means there are so many more not tiny things
That aren't being said, they're just known
In the in between

She is not gone, you know
She can't be
She's too selfish to fully let go
She's too good at justifying her hidden delicacies

She can still hear you
Still feel you
Still knows what you're thinking
When you're thinking it
Sometimes she uses her magic to make it so
Though she's too protective to ever let anyone else know

She manipulates the wind
Makes it carry her secrets up to the stars
So they twinkle with her intentions
Until she is a random thought stealing into your brain
Your heart
Your sleeping soul
Your aching bones

You know...
Those parts she claimed
When you so willingly signed them over to her
As her name brushed over your lips
In an exhale of relief
She kept those

She never intended to give them back
That was in the fine print of the contract
When you began the conversation
You're hers
You always will be

You could be with a hundred others
And still...
Those secrets
That touch
That quiet
That...

It's hers
It will always be hers
She's too selfish to let it go
And she's far too protective of her delicacies

The pen that fell spilled my words onto the carpet
I watched them seep into the threads
Painting a distorted picture
Blots of ink made Warshak tests
Out of my pretty phrases
My
     rhymes
               My  
                  deeper
                            meaning
                                         lines

Just shapes of black across the unforgiving selfish floor
Evil pen that divulged my secrets
Hiding love language and spells into careless synthetic blend fibers

Perhaps it was jealous that its magic only worked in my hands
When my fingers stroked its shaft
Until it exploded with graceful,
                                               powerful,
                                                       unforgiving,
                                                                descriptive,
                                                                         colorful,
                                                                             life giving,
                                                                                   life taking,
                                                                                        incantations

******* pen that stole my voice
The one that those without ears can hear
My silent screaming acquaintances
How grateful I was that you were my safe space to speak
Our secret languages
That give color and life to the world
We who are unafraid to feel

But that ******* pen silenced me.
For years I've been quiet
Watching conversations
                           words...
                               letters....
                                     songs....

But you know what?  
**** that pen

Coffee black, is like bitter water
Too quick
Too much hot liquid
No mystery to it

I like my coffee with cream
Powdered cream that adds the smallest bit of thickness
To the dark water
Followed by a shot of flavor
Flavor that unfolds with warm beauty when it
Flows over your tongue

As though the flavor will also enhance the next words
To leave your lips
Words kissed with sweetness and warmth
A soothing coat to quiet any bitterness

You know you have enough cream in my coffee
When it matches the color of his skin
Caramelly, earthen, warm, silken...
Smooth like the swirls of the spoon as you stir
Sweet like his warm lips sweeping over mine
Warmth that flows over the tongue
Glides down the throat
Enveloping the sleeping parts and kissing them awake

I love cream in my coffee in the mornings.

Don't add kindle to the fire
She's sleeping right now
Her sleep is calm and safe

Her fire, when lit,
It burns too bright
It calls the spirits to dance
The soul to enliven
Her flame is gentle kisses
To all the deepest darkest parts

See her quiet and calm
She is just a candle
A gentle glow in the dark room

Don't add kindle to her fire
Her burn is that of life
Life that seethes into your veins
Veins that had been hardened by life
Her fire is fresh vitae

Her flame burns the old
Demands the new
Makes all around her a Phoenix
Live! She demands it!

But, you always did like to play with fire...

Can you hear them?
An entire language
Words pounding at the dam
Throwing themselves against the solid walls
Desperate to break it down
Soon they'll overflow

Soon all the words that haven't been said
They'll come flooding out
Washing over everything that has and hasn't been
Years of thoughts all rushing

But that doesn't mean they'll be heard
There will be hidden messages
Secrets that aren't meant for working ears
Or seeing eyes
They'll break through in codes
Codes that only whisper
Letters that jumble and misshape
With funny accents and curves
And ink that disappears

Can you hear them?
The poetry
The stories
All the letters threatening to
Flood through their silent prison
They're going to break down the walls
They're going to overflow
They're going to sing
To write
And then disappear

Wake up little bird
The sun is shining
Wake up little bird
I have food for your belly
Wake up little bird
Your song is missing
Wake up little bird
Your cage is too quiet

Little bird,
Are you there?
Little bird,
Have you lost your song?
Little bird,
Little bird?

Don't leave me in this silence.

Because everything is and must be about you.
Your pain
Your beauty
Your silence
Your tears
Your ache
Your solace
And what am I?
The muse?
The nurse?
The safety net?
The lover?
The girlfriend?
The wife?
The one that got away?
None of that has anything to do with me.
You fail to see the selfishness of you.
You fail to see how you take advantage
Because it’s all hidden in pretty words
Words that paint beautiful pictures
But all they are
All they ever will be are words
I don’t want to be that person
And I don’t want a person that can be as this
So continue to live
Continue to thrive
I, at least, will not be a secret in my own life
I, at least, will thrive in integrity
I am and always will be true to who I am
That same strength that angers you now
You would’ve loved had it been in your favor.
But then, that’s all about you...again.

I thought I was doing it right
Loving and caring
Protecting and nurturing
But it was not these things that you wanted
You did not want my watchful eye
You did not want my encompassing embrace
You wanted "freedom"
I offered you food
You preferred drink
I offered you health
You preferred death
I offered you home and hearth
You preferred open night skies
I offered you me
You preferred her
I offered you words
You wanted silent acceptance
I thought I was doing it right
Loving you the best way I knew how
Little did I know my love was too heavy
Too much
And too late