I want to write about the debilitating soulfulness with which I love you and your broken heart and gentle hugs.

I can't seem to find the words to describe how soft the blue of your eyes is.

I can't find the right bat of my eyelashes to show you what my mind is wrapped around.

I cannot laugh in the right way to express bubbling joy, swelling memories.

My heart aches itself to the size of a quasar, begging to find a word greater than love.

Sink into the
softest bits of my
skin

Let me bottle
the scent of
your t-shirt
after you have
held onto me

Let me be the
gentle waves
that rock you to sleep

(A simple love)

Fingers like crayons,
melting over flames,
dripping on your eyelids.
You have your
technicolor world
without the ecstasy.
You told me it wasn't possible.
You told me it wasn't possible
to get drunk without your dad.
You told me it was Pepsi,
it was Diet Coke.
You told me it was love.
It was something like
decay,
in fall,
in the brush,
the words your mother
swept under the rug.

In the smallest winter nights,
sailing in the eyes of Stan Lee,
Winona Rider,
Joseph Stalin,
the slightest cross unfolds, unfurls into a tree.
Jesus's face is written in the leaves.
Don't believe me?
Look into your mother's eyelashes.

The oriel breaks the spell of night to read me fairytales in languages only the stars understand.

I count my fingers every day like I count the trees in my backyard, checking to make sure nothing changed because change means growing up and my body tells me that growing up is nothing more than learning to give up on seeing with your eyes.

I let the beach be hell, sand like tiny reminders of growing smaller every day, growing less visible.

I let the lake be heaven, no waves and no war, no machine guns, no fascists, no animal testing, no mothers with knives, no fathers with voices.

I feel the cardinal ripen and rot off the branches of the poplar tree, begging to see the final season of the Sopranos, just like my friend did when his legs and mouth stopped running.

I see the tattoos of everywhere you said you hated, Paris, Michigan, Dakota, and England appear on the soles of my feet. I crush them every time I walk to your house.

The albatross speaks only three words, let it be. Let it be.

Call me humming bird:
Flitting like time
Feathers like skipping stones
Beak like protest
Wings like home

I want to undress the sorrow that bites the wings off doves, make it bear, make it holy, make it scream.

I want to sing to the anger that shakes your hands, beads the sweat upon your palms. I want to soothe it to sadness, soothe it to scared, soothe it to self-loathing, and then soothe it again. I want to rub its shaking shoulders and kiss its forehead until it is serene, sleeping in the backseat.

I want to whisper the stories from all my birthdays and what age means to the God that chokes the air from your blood and puts fear into the stomach of mothers. I want to calm the waves of your heart, be the lighthouse to the way you felt at age five, wrapped in the forgiving and fragile skinned arms of your grandfather.

I want to be the lung unchanged by smoker's death wish. I want to be the alcohol that slips passed your lips and makes you tell your mom that you love her, tell your sister it wasn't her fault, tell your dad that you're healing. I want to be the ****** that moves under your marked skin, the blood that can't pass the tourniquet.

I want to feel myself inside your throat, climbing to taste your teeth and thread string through the spaces between your words, make a tapestry of every missing apology.

I want to be the wind shaking the curtains of every girl who has starved herself, cold and realizing that a woman is not a body, a woman is the bearer of life and bearer of tenderness. A girl eating an apple, telling the grass that the moon is everyone's mother and will never let the tides rise or fall without a gentle tug on the sleeve of the oceans, "breathe".

I want to be the life that moves through the earth, the snapshots in motion that we call time, the peace that the bottom of our lungs must feel.