Say anything but the words in your head.
Smile when he does.
Don’t take the flash in his eyes too personally,
(everything he finds beautiful warrants the cosmos from their depth)
Blush and be flattered.
Watch his lips, but don’t read them.
(The literature you find there will always be the stuff of fantasy)

He’ll laugh, low and warm,
and under it, you will flicker like candlelight,
but a wick only lasts so long.

If you fall,
you’ll fall from great heights.
His nimble fingers won’t  make that
kind of catch.

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

Don’t ask me about our conversations,

How he turns my tongue into a loom that weaves innuendo,

every other word a variation of invitation.

"Hello" purrs like "come here,"

"good morning" yearns to be "night."

The constant struggle of spaces-

to find,

to fill,

to close.

Don’t ask me about his mouth,

It’s rhythm that makes a stutter of my pulse.

His lips, how they ruby and part, taut like a drum

over his crooked smile,

how I want them to make music of me.

Don’t ask about my fingers afflicted by wanderlust,

how he feels like a long, open road, the lines of him begging

exploration, to trace the places remembered…

discover what’s yet to be found.

Don’t ask me about his hands.

How they are beautiful and skilled in ignition.

About my tinder skin or the fire of his gaze…

how I burn under the lidded, blue flames.

Don’t ask me about my hunger,

the way my stomach drops when he comes to me, jaw tensed, sweet

skinned and swollen,

how it’s yet to be appeased.

How I shape my lips to say “yes,”

how it always feels like “please”

I know the strength of my own voice,
It cracks frequently, words have weight,
and are weapons if thrown at the right angle,
so I stay left.

Anything I’ve ever tried to let go of has claw marks.
Anything I hold grows roots around my bones,
keeping me together since I learned to live split.
Come here,
I want to kiss all your scratches.

I know getting this far
was a tightrope walk over a chasm.
That you break apart
and ignore your whole image
but I look at you,
and see all the ways a soul can illuminate,
yours lights lanterns in all my dark places,
You burn.

I know
there will always be more questions
than answers in my mouth,
but if you are sure of nothing else,
whether it is days you
out blaze the sun
or nights you shatter yourself
into pieces for later collection,


I will love you when gathered and still.  
I will love you when you are a storm.

I don’t know any other way.

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.

He loved her, of course.
But more important than that,
better than that,
He chose her.
Day after day.
Love is easy.  
Choice: that was the thing.

And, one of the hardest things you can learn,
is to leave what wants to be left,
when it is not your choice to go.
Love.
The feeling is what you own, not the person you've attached it to

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.

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.

I once read, and I’m paraphrasing,  
that "there are two kinds of lovers…those you write poems for,
and those you don’t"

I have built every word on your kind of compassion,
inked of this heart in my hands.
I know I’m careless with it sometimes,
take for granted it’s resilience.
Often dropping, then coming to cradle it's pulse may be
my only notion of grace,
that you believe in my clumsy grasp.

I know,
loving me is not easy.
Even now, I run in circles around and from your patience,
trying to find or keep or cleanse the 'me' in 'us',
but the distance to home is always wherever I stand
to your arms.

By nature, I’m homesick often.
Your love is a house I want to grow old in.
I promise to take my coat off.
Just leave the heat on high.

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 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.

When is it over?
When your name isn’t synonymous with “beautiful”,  
wanting to say “…the rise and fall of my heart when I hear , see,  taste, touch, smell"
encompassing the "you",
what you do too.

Sprained look,  your eyes...
Bound & sliced by silence.

and this will...fade.  
The salted end,
It’s presence
hovers. Burning..
wills itself bittersweet.

How the heart can beat so, so strong but never in a straight line.
That a promise is not a contract but breaking either has consequence.
That ‘consequence‘ sounds negative and rarely is.
How time heals…and that healing itself is change, you are not the same person carrying a scar with a story.
Giving up and letting go are two sides of the same coin that you clench in your fist, or carry in your pocket.  
That, if there is strength in numbers, it’s never as much as a single soul with intense purpose.
To grow in a love that lifts itself and still keeps you steady,
not one that makes you want to apologize for the fall.
What it takes to understand a person that cares enough about you
to hide how little they care about you.
How to compromise with anyone but yourself
because common ground is shared,
but you are always wherever you stand.
That indifferent is the worst thing to be,
because anything real has an end point,
and nothing, can go on forever.
How to get out of your head enough to
remember you have a body.
To speak truth, despite.
That OK
is where everyone usually ends up,
even if we **** up entirely along the way.

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”