Falling in love taught me more
about faith than any priest ever could.
When I look at you I know
all the ways my soul touches the earth.
I look into the mirror and see my eyes,
so old and deeply grounded,
yet with roots shy of twenty years old.
I am wrinkly hands and impulsive actions,
I am missing teeth and the belief in the tooth fairy,
I am the wilting rose and the shiny dew-coated seed.

If time is a concept based upon
distance, then my soul is
as old as the distance between me and you.
And I can dive deep down in my pockets,
and pull up, in my hand,
all the worlds I loved and lost you in.
And I can swim 10,000 leagues
under my anatomy, and pull up,
from my gut, the feeling I know
to be true when I see you.
And I can't tell if the lesson I
am meant to learn is that I need
to stop loving you, or that I need
to love myself more than I love you.

But when you tell me to give up on you,
the hair on the back of my neck stands up;
no, no, no, it's not supposed to be this way.
And it is with jagged fingernails and red lipstick,
that I dare you to prove me wrong,
but all you do is smile,
and give me less reasons to miss you,
and more reasons to cry,
and more doubt to drink in,
and less hope to have,
and, finally,
another life in which I loved and lost you.

I am a flower
on the broken bridge
and you are the hand
that places me in your hair,
behind your ear,
and you let me whisper
all the awful reasons
I was broken off
from my stem and
from my garden,
and you let me cry
about why I am a bad, bad,
bad, bad, flower.
And that is when you tell me
that no fingers deserved
to pluck me down to nothing.
I have not lost my stem,
but found a new one.
You are my stem.
And I am your flower.
Some days, I will be
your stem, and you
will be my flower.
And we can learn
to grow ourselves
our own new stems.
Because it's not about
the baggage,
it's about who helps you
unpack.

Waiting for letters
in great, wide envelopes.
Waiting for someone
else to decide
if I am worthy
to try for my dreams.

It all comes down
to letters
and how they
translate into a
number
and how that number
translates into a value
of you.

I wrote about how
I pulled myself out
of my own early grave
and how a pill
and a doctor
and a God
ignited
a fire in my heart
to live
and live
and live well.

Today, I am not a flower,
I am a seed,
who only wishes to be a flower;  
but fears nobody
will give me water.

I could be a garden.