Kissing you was like breathing air
Simple and natural
Easy and sweet

But I didn't want air
I craved a forest fire
I needed a tornado to rip through me

I wanted bruises and cuts
But I craved you
For you to be the eye of the storm

To be there as air
So when the winds died
I could still breathe

Because though I wanted heat
Fire dies without air
Just like me, without you.

No eyes can see me
Though Im always there.
Forgotten and abused
But no one seems to care.

I feel like a human heart
Caged inside a living chest.
Ever beating; never freed;
No escape until my death.

-ARI

The tree with a hundred years goes
Fires, wreckage, wind and snows
And bears so well it can't be heard
Not by men, beast or bird

The tree gives as a giver should
It's beauty among us and faithful wood
And the tree, silent to our woes
Stands tall when after all else goes

And the tree with patience practiced as an art
Lives better than us without a heart

My Father, who means well, makes me lunch
A man who’s sandwiches could never be
trusted, who used the mossy breadends cause
thats how they did it on the farm but
I am the cry baby who rejects the
deadened bread, dark wilted lettuce spines
lettuce rinds, inedible, unclean
Perspiring, lovingly wrapped in cellophane
And now I’m old enough I must
so carefully control what’s
between my full, whole, mid-loaf slices,
Fret about gluten.
Jesus help me I’m so afraid of
invisible moulds and the taste of iron
in those glossy cylinders of upended campbells
tomato: quivering naked, vermillion in the pan,
like chilled organs they appeared hepatic
I’m sure the milk he adds is soured he
cannot be trusted, my father, but
forgive him he knows not what he does, I
know they didn't have much on the farm I
am spoiled like the milk, too sensitive, I
wilt, because I have become too hard to feed,
we didn't know what to do with this kind of love.