I wish to be honest and unashamed about the totality of my experiences and to always assume their humanness in an effort to minimize the illusions of separateness that come from my judgements of my reality

i so search
my fingers clench
your softening eyes
demand unity
the looking cross
throughout the days
the growing fear
the realizations of the endless
boundaries of this home
how to ensure
how to ignore
my imagined pains
to know the proximity
is to run away from distance
to not want a blink
was never considered
but here
your softened eyes
my fingers rest

to be with you is to be dust
to disperse and float
to be minuscule and ever reaching all at once
to settle and be sent all by a look from you

to be with you is to be sand
heavy and wet in your crashing
light and forgiving in your light
turning to glass in your heat
to feel you looking through

writing poetry in the back of quantitative methods
I don't want to get too metaphysical
can we?
the abstract is where I left my bags
I can't find my way back
there are no entryways, no guides
sometimes the trees or the colors tease
but they fall flat backward, a standing set piece
nothing for me to reach my arms into
i used to be up to my elbows
the architecture was screaming
my teachers sang in class, cried through the lessons
everything moved in speech
now I never reach the action potential
the environment slightly inflates but I do not take off
too grounded, to real, too fixated on things that are surface
I want to fly and I want to drown
to be in the thick and fight my way onto paper
to feel in metaphors and abstractions
for now, i will run an analysis of variance
and go to sleep, indefinitely

you are so dear to me. my confusion sits down in your company and spins together with your murkiness. if i had known what to call home, call love, i would have come sooner. dont call on me if I leaven. don’t call on me, I used to say. I bend over like willow in this suction and I mend all that my fingers can manage. I design, stitch pink into satin and forget the navigation I had ruptured in the past. the stems of us are laying down or blooming or moving inside but none of it matters. you matter. matter of fact it isn’t even the hum in the neck that shadows. it is the ugly closing that opens my sails to your beckoning power.

opened the french doors
to a warm front
after weeks of single digits
a blood orange in hand
dripping hair
nick drake strumming
juice bubble popped on tongue
sun in golden curls
trees suddenly spring
a line thru everything
a moment to just exist
in pink and orange shelter