One morning, over coffee, in a well lit breakfast nook, with toast crumbs on her lips,

and sleep fading from her eyes-she’ll be abruptly brave and ask you if any of the words scribbled in the  bent notebook you carry around and never share, are for her.

“Do you write about me?” The hit of the question will leave you  dazed. A response well deserved will not come….and she will sigh, and stand up,walk out of the well lit room and you won’t ask her to stay.

A long distance runner in the obstacle course of your communication skills, and she is getting tired.

Tired of your withdrawn ability to only filter emotion through a pen to a page.

“I don’t know why you have lips” she said once, laughing with a hint of hurt So, you pressed your face to her throat and made her remember how speech isn’t always necessary.

What she doesn’t know… and what you can’t seem to tell her, is that she is in you so she is every word.

She is every word you write and that is nothing you can say.

Instead you leave the notebook in the rocking chair by the window, with her favorite view,

of a stream beyond a field. “It reminds me that moments can stop whole hours” she said once,

and that was a line you worked words around for years.

You rip a page and leave it folded inside “Just keep reading”

I don’t know when I stopped

trying to close the distance in your eyes.

However strong my halved limbs,

some places are too far and far gone

to run to.

Once upon a time, I named all my bridges perseverance

and built them unpermitted

in your heart stream.

You never halted construction

then let me solo dive my days away.

Deep in that blue, I never found a bottom,

and treading water is the same as running in place.

So, I grew matchsticks for finger tips

and swirled gasoline in my mouth,

spit flames with the same urgency

I once hammered points for your favor.

It took me 20 something years to learn to live in this temple,

I don’t have that kind of time to convince worship in yours.

I’m catalyst, you’re muse and too polar for harmony.

We never stood at the same time on even ground.

Here now, the sky displays forever fire

and opens behind me burning.

I have no place to go

but further away.

The last time you saw her,

there was a sureness in her gaze not present before,

an acceptance of your place,

this beginning of an end of a beginning.

You still didn’t know what to tell her,

but anything done will resonate in those calm eyes-

that she is more than the nothing you say,

but that will never be enough.

“You don’t know how beautiful you are” she says, and that, to her, is strange.

She tells you, over and over.

She wants you to believe her,

to use her as a mirror instead of a maze to get lost in.

Still, she lets you try,

mistaking freckles for breadcrumbs by moonshine,

enough light to find your way in,

then out.

You try to picture another face and wonder what they’ll look like when you find them,

beneath the rock,

hiding in the haystack,

made in the rough,

Their arms like doors and eyes like windows, waiting to be the place you live.

You know they’ll inspire your coveted words.

She,

She will be a letter at the bottom of a box in the back of your closet you will read over

only upon coming home,

to remember how much you are missed when you’re gone,

to remind you what’s left when you leave.

the memory is like leaving a place then leaving

it over and over till clouds

appear below me,

but I still don’t know what to do

with all the you that’s left

under my skin.

Days like these, when you tick inside me,

I wish I could take a bottle of your voice

and place it to my ear like a capped sea shell,

just to hear the rush of your breath.

I want a picture of your feet ,

So I can remember what you look like

when you chose to stand beside me,

toe to toe to mine, I’ll feel less alone

when I reach and air is all there is.

I wonder if I think your name hard enough

will you feel my thoughts hum, adding to your energy

wherever you are-

I know you still see me.

The fragments I learned about you, I gathered and sold to no one.

I scribbled them in a book by an author of the same name, with the inscription:

“Don’t come here, made of matches,

unless you want to play with fire.”

A rosary of lunar pages that keep me honest,

this prayer in recall happens nightly.

I didn’t understand the impression of a higher power until you

spoke in tongues above me, through gritted teeth,

the sweat like blood on your brow.

Your ability to be blind and everywhere at once crafted me trembling in faith.

What was thought a dead language, had found its speaker.

But being branched, fragile truth uttered nowhere else-easy to forget.

How air is tangible, but invisible and taken for granted.

So proves that vision isn’t the strongest sense,

just the cruelest.

You still wouldn’t say my name in the street, even only to remember the vowels.

It is easy,

so very easy,

to mistake benevolence for love

I've got a boomerang shaped heart, it comes around. My mother told me “That’s how you forgive yourself”. Forgiveness is partially forgetting…. and I’m losing the memory of his hands. We are more than the things we do to ourselves.

Now would be the best possible time to start rummaging for dropped coins, forgotten change accumulates. Now would also be the best possible time to cultivate anything cherished neglected. Love is organic, left stagnant, it will soften and rot.

I can’t find north on a map. But there was a time I would have located the star and thanked him for hanging it.  But that’s as far away as the pin point light now fading, but enough to find my way home. Losing direction doesn't mean having nowhere to belong.

I would say I’m a gazelle to his lion, or vice versa-one of us feels eaten alive.  That he is the 10th time I’ve started smoking. That he is the match on the ground, the lit end burning sweet smoke to the sky.
That he is chilled sin in a high ball glass. That I am a thirsty, criminal tongue.  
I would tell you he is the rearview mirror and the road unfolding before me. That he is everywhere I want to go and nowhere I need to be.
I would tell you what’s gained walking through a fire love
is not a suffocation of being, but a blanket that covers the whole world.
I would tell you that even tarnished gold gleams under stain .
I would tell you he is a throwing arm.
I would tell you that I am a boomerang.