“Just loosen your grip a little,”
Fiddling fingers say to me
Quite condescendingly,
“If you hold on to something
Too tight for too long
One day you’ll open your fist
And realize you’ve crushed it.”
The breath that carries his words
Buries this stone heart like a seed
And parts the rising steam of the
Teacup he raises up to steady lips,
Of which my quivering jaw grows
Envious.
“That’s *******.”
I spit the venom back at him,
Proving my limited vocabulary
And badly developed “come-back” skills.
It makes me ill how much he tries to pretend that
Everything is fine.
“Everything is going to be
Fine”
He says,
“Everything has a reason.”
And I hate him for it.
But I can’t hide the upright curves of a smile
When he tells me
We all make an impact.
We all buckle at our knees in the rain,
Fists full with parts of our soul
That we wish to add to this the world.
It’s why we leave behind fingerprints
On everything we touch.
It’s proof of our existence
And a reminder that once,
We cared enough to reach out and
Make an exchange with the things we love.

But I counter it with,
“Fingerprints can be washed away
In the time it takes a snowflake
To melt in your palm.
In the split second of a gunshot.”
It’s too risky to wear our hearts on our sleeves
These days
So instead we push it down
Our solar plexus
And compress it like coal.
We fill the hole in our chest
With cyanogen-filled cigarettes
And nicotine best guesses.
We doorbell-ditch the addresses
Of our Demons in Disguise
With makeshift wings and sky blue eyes.
Taunting them with kid tricks
But always running
Because we’re too afraid
To strip them of their masquerade.
Naive to the fact that it might be more
Than just child’s play.
So I tell him it’s okay
To admit that he’s still afraid of the dark.
That we need to strap ourselves
With something harder than skin.
Because this world is hazardous,
I learned it the first time I saw my father cry.
That’s why I sit here with
White-knuckled hands clutching to
Everything that I can call my own
And not opening my eyes
Because I dream better with them closed.
So I won’t loosen this grip
Because it seems so simple to slip
Through these fingertips.

And so he sits.
And so I shake.
And he sits, and I shake
And we take that deadpan silence of a symphony
Right before the orchestra strikes the first chord
And we make honesty with it.
We make honesty like,
Honestly, the next sounds
To escape our mouths
Are going to be the most important words I’ve ever heard
So let's make them worth it.
We make honesty
Like concentration camp *******
Because it’s how we still feel alive
And a way to say, “**** the world
I’ve still got something it can’t take.”
And while I can’t shake this moment of vulnerability
He draws a hand up to my chest,
Pulls out a breath,
And dissects the swollen god-complex.
He filters the air
I hinder to bear upon my heavy shoulders
And slips it back, past cracked crimson lips
To ignite this sarcophagus with life.
“Everything is going to be
Fine.”
He says,
“Everything has a reason,
So explore the world with both hands before of you
Feet making a rhythmic beat on the
Black paved street
As you follow broken yellow lines,
Racing headlights to the horizon.
And leave behind a trail of fingerprints
So you’ll never forget where you’ve been.”