Have you ever heard a song
So sweet that lyrics would corrupt it?
So pure that you hold your breath
Afraid you'll shatter it just by sighing?
It's a torn feeling, an unnameable feeling, the description of which can only lead you in circles
Hopelessly tangled in the desire to express it.
It is something so excruciatingly, frustratingly ineffable that you can't even move, frozen in awe, locked in a complex, pressurised longing.
Something
So achingly lovely that just the thought of it 
Pulls tears from you in diamond threads
And makes you, briefly, a shimmering echo of it,
Lit
From inside.

I say this
Even though I know that trying to describe that feeling
Is like trying to grasp at mist
I say this
I say it because
I felt like that in your arms.

I looked at you
In the half-light
And just for a second I saw you fully, in a new way.
The light loved you.
It slid along your skin like it came from the stars
And not from a bedside lamp propped against the wall.
You were so smooth, so soft, tendrils of hair escaping their pinnings and following the long lines of your neck.
Your eyes gleamed through your smile,
And all the sweetness and wit and beauty behind them,
All of that that I could touch, all that art looking at me in that moment, like having a symphony play for just you,
That soul under that skin, a whole galaxy of loves and hates and dreams and insecurities coursing through you...
And me
An inch away
Less
Pressed up against you like a parallel universe, so near and so sacred and so shockingly tangible-
The heat of you, so solid but so pliable next to me, so much a part of me that nothing about me could feel empty.

I couldn't breathe for joy, suddenly.

You could have been the moon, just then,
Or a goddess, like one of those smooth, white, subtly glowing statues in the museum halls,
Women I always imagined came alive at night and basked in the starlight,
Absorbing it to throw it back upon the world when day broke.
Your fingertips on me traced patterns
And I wanted them to touch me deeper
Wished my body was more my soul than flesh can be
So that I could feel yours in your hands.
It was too much!
It was
Not enough.
And I laughed, hid my face in your neck, felt your pulse there and how fragile your collarbones were.
I wanted to seep into your skin like rain.
I tried to shrug past it
But the feeling grabbed me by the shoulders and shook the words out of me,
And suddenly I was cheek to cheek with you,
Confessing...

After that the way I touched you changed.
I don't know if you felt it,
But I did.
It had been coming, sneaking up on me, all that day.
In my arms, beneath my palms, I held something so unutterably precious
Whenever I held you
And I knew it fully then, unable to unfeel it.
It made me tender in a way that pierced my heart
In a way that scared me
Because it felt like why I'm here.

If someday I get to tell you I love you
I will tell you that it was that moment when I knew for sure I would.
That moment when it all became so crushingly, beautifully real to me-
When gravity shifted, and you began to pull me instead.

I have been silent.
I have been silent not for loss
Or mourning
For those drag words from me
With or without my consent.
I have been silent because I am trying to be
Gentle
In love
When I am a thunderstorm made flesh,
A hurricane,
A seismic wave of passion and pain.
Inside
I burn
And it has been a long time
Since I have loved so deeply
As to press my sizzling hands to my own stomach
Just to keep another person from burning their fingers on the love I hold beneath my skin.
I have been silent
But I have not been extinguished-
Far from it, I have risen.
I have gone blue and white with heat.
I have wandered through the blackened trees in the ghostly calm of the night
And kindled them to flames with my palms.
I have left embers
Shifting and sighing in my footprints
And the earth has learned a new name to score into its stone and treebark when I travel through the darkness
Searching for a rest I will not find.
And there is joy in this,
There is such joy!
Although the heat presses,
Although the light licks at my ankles when I wade too far into my own heart's dreams.
I leave joy in these silent places, black and velvety and slumbering in the night-
I wake them
I wake them because I have been woken
And my heart has become something that melts
Something that burns
Something that hungers and consumes
And glows with shimmering reds and golds no matter how tightly I curl around it and hush its hissing whispers.
I leave joy because I can't contain it
And it reaches roots into the ground with every step I take-
A fearful joy,
A joy that knows its hunger
Will be its starvation.
A joy that breathes light and grasps at shadows
Because that is all it knows how to do.
A joy that turns its face up to the rain
To feel a moment's peace and cooling clarity.

Oh, I may have been silent
But I have not been quiet.

the stillness
of some nights
has few equals

owls sounds
out of nowhere
under this canopy

honeyed darkness
wrapped around
my lonely steps

I said, "God, I hurt."
And God said, I know."

I said, "God, I cry a lot."
And God said, "That is why I gave you tears."

I said, "God, I am so depressed."
And God said, "That is why I gave you Sunshine."

I said, "God, life is so hard."
And God said, "That is why I gave you loved ones."

I said, "God, my loved one died."
And God said, "So did mine."

I said, "God, it is such a loss."
And God said, I saw mine nailed to a cross."

I said, "God, but your loved one lives."
And God said, "So does yours."

I said, "God, where are they now?"
And God said, "Mine is on My right and yours is in the Light."

I said, "God, it hurts."
And God said, I know."

~ Posted on the wall at the Oklahoma City bombing site.

It has been a long time
Since my hair has held the scent of cigarette smoke
From the sighed stories of a girl who has seen too much pain
And not enough tenderness.
It always comforts me
To wake in the morning
With that little reminder
That for once I showed love without
Destroying anything.