Please let me take your hand and run my thumb across your palm to show that I care too much for you,
Let each stroke be a catalyst to a fire I am hesitant to ignite
Like a child playing with matches,
each stroke on your palm is the base
and my thumb is the match
gently gliding across wondering if I
will burn if I try to make sparks-
I am hesitant to create this fire.

My thoughts are all askew,
but when I piece them together
I find they are a puzzle
made of you.

-20w-

It would be quite easy
for you to break me
Shatter me like the glass
I didn't know my heart was made of.
I'll repair like stone
And turn colder
But wiser?
When it comes to you
It seems as though my heart of stone
Turns to fragile glass
At any given moment
I think of you.

I'm going to fly away
I've strung two diamond kites to my back as wings
And I've tracked down the winding river-like patterns of the wind

I'm going to fly away
Because my kites will have no trouble
Picking up my hollow body, empty of life and experience and substance and
everything that defines what it means to be alive, up into the sky.

I'm going to glide on the air
and slowly make a parabola as I slide down the air current like
I'm on a water slide and then curve upwards
as if I'm a rocketeer testing out the power of my engine.

I'm going to glide on the air
because my feet are too tired of carrying the weight on my shoulders.
I want to feel the weightlessness that has encompassed my heart
every time it got its hopes up and every time it was broken.
The weightlessness that my empty lungs felt as
I lurched for oxygen in the smoky air
The weightlessness that my arms felt hugging
every one of imaginary friends that never felt real enough to believe in.
I want to feel the same physical weightlessness,
yet know it carries a much different meaning than all the others,
The one you feel when things are just where you want them to be,
The small floating instant in the transition from your upward velocity running out and
your momentum building as you are suddenly falling down.
The weightlessness of balance that I have only felt in the wrong ways.

I'm going to fly away
Because as a teenager I specialize in the concept of hating
every human being out there including myself.
and yet I'm dressed in all white save for the vibrant color of my kites
because I'd rather the world paint me into what it really is instead of me
painting the world into my skewed perceptions.

I'm going to fly away
and fly so far away and for so long
that my skin will turn the color of the sky
my kites will become a part of my body
my eyes will turn into every color humankind has failed to see
and I will feel alive,
my body full of the mass of life
that has replaced the weight on my shoulders
Which tried to hold me down to walk the concrete ground,
face the gray brick walls, and breathe the misused air

I'm going to fly away,
So I will learn to catch my breath the same way a landscape will take it away,
So I will hear the raw wavelengths of our earth,
So I will reach back to the trees reaching up to me from the ground
So I will feel the air currents take me along its route to nowhere in particular,
So I will live in fantastically unimaginable ways
So that when I land again,
I will be full of weight I don't mind carrying on my shoulders.
Yes,I'm going to fly away.

My heart will tear apart-
But like any other muscle
It'll simply grow back stronger.