I met a woman with a trumpet tongue who played her words on paper, white as truces. she told me through my stereo "we've both had days where the phoenix didn't rise".
we' have all had days where the phoenix did not rise. but thank goodness my birthday was the first time I heard your lips part and saw your teeth spill oceans of blue blankets across my jellyfish eyes.
I wish everyone understood the irony of writing love poems to a lesbian, but my hands never seemed to reach the ends of my arms like I want them to.
They always get stuck dancing somewhere in the middle. playing a tune only they can sway to knowing all the steps bouncing off every syllable while others let their wrists go limp as if the puppeteers needed strings to tune their fiddle for a happy song somewhere far far away.
so take my breath again keep it wherever it is that you keep the gasps our ears give you as your words pull the heartstrings we forgot we had that we forgot how to play to wave our wet-noodle fingers and conduct a life worth living so full of blatant love not afraid to make no sense my chest was an rusty locket the day before I heard you and now I am so full of echoes from it's tiny, timid click.
For Andrea, you are a sketchbook muse, something I have to guess at on my worst days when there are no words and the rain smells like a swan song from the sky.
you kept me writing when there was nothing left to draw or sing or smell or see anymore. when there was black smog between my eardrums pounding out the dying breath of clouds you held me through tinny earbuds and poems I etched in the moss running over back roads in my mind
so I hope you find peace every time you find a microphone and that someday, I'll play you a tune which echoes through you, with a tiny, timid click and a full breath that resuscitates the open blue until we are both whole beneath it until, again, we are true.