SWEETHEART,

FOR SOME,
LOVE IS THE CURE.

AND

FOR SOME,
LOVE IS THE DISEASE.

You're my storm cloud disguised as sunshine
but your masquerade never stops the rain.
Laughs like lightning flashing across your face
sharp and dangerous, followed by the thunder of
my ignorance, cluing you in on how far your lies
stretch into my desperation to be wanted.

Lightning.
Thunder.
Oh I never thought
I was that funny
Your electric strings
Pull the punch lines out of my mouth.
Thunder.
The lightning's best friend.

Thunder.
You must really like me
You must have told your friends about me too.
Because that cackles coming out of their
throats when I tell a joke sound just like
the storm, the zigzags of fire that tear through the clouds.
telling me how funny I am, how much they love having me around.
How you need me.
Time for my response… its my job right?
Thunder.

Thunder.

Why is it now that the way you curl your lips
when I make my jokes
looking
less
and less
like a smile?
Your friends know that shape
and they know how to make their lips look the same way.
Is it some contagious thing that they all have, and disease
passed around the room every time that lightning escapes.
But they all think I am funny
It must just be a friend thing…
I should learn how to do it too.
Thunder.

Thunder.

Streaming pixels
Blurry faces of “friends”
it must have been a mistake
The love me
next time,
I’ll make sure to clear it up with them
why wouldn't they want me to attend?
Thunder.

Thunder.


Glances like knives
Darting through the air like flies
and infestation of insects that
carry messages that
I don’t understand.
But they do.
Like a major league team
catch after catch
never missing those eyes that
seem a little bit darker
and a little bit colder.
Passing the ball around the bases
returning the favor.
Why can’t I grip ball that seems to bind
them all together
leaving trails of
text messages
and parties
that I was not invited to
this ball that seems to always
keep me on the outfield.
And how come everytime that ball goes
around
and
around….
its feels like
a punch to the stomach
never ceasing to knock me
down
and
leave me
breathless.


This must be what friendship feels like…
Thunder.


Is it?
because I look around
these hallways
where I always walk to fast
trying to keep up
yet I am always
one
step
behind.
I see that
these other girls
walk in straight lines
arms joined so that no one
falls
too
far behind
yet I’m always walking in
dizzy circles
wondering when they will
turn around to see if I am
still following,
still standing,
still funny.

Thunder, the lightning's best friend…
but that is never who I was to you.

I know the face
inside every car that
passes my bedroom window.

Why do I feel so ****



lonely?





I'm surrounded by these faces
of people who I have known since
pre-school.
Yet I don't think they have ever met me.

I am a piece of shrapnel,
pulled from the angry fist of an angel,
who spent a lot of her time watching cars crash.
Wondering what we've made of creation.
but the metalworker feel asleep.
before he could finish making
me into something,
beautiful.

And when he woke up it was too late.
I can't change.
I hardened perfectly into that mold
the one that society said would look good on me.
So those people took one look at me and then
cut out their eyes.
No longer able to see what else
I might have inside.



So I live in the dark.
The girl who I am when I am alone
is not ready to be seen from the road.

She's not strong.
She's not ready,
not ready to explain the light
streaming from the windows
of the big white house around the corner from
school and the ice cream place.

Maybe she's to afraid that her light,
isn't really there, just something made up,
to give her hope that she has something,
to help her escape this
town.

But maybe she's afraid that her light...
will be too much of a surprise for those
drivers drunk on dreams.
Because being herself,
shouldn't end with
angry angles.

65 years from now when my grandchild looks me and asks me
"Grandma do your cheeks look like they are falling and why does your backbone rise higher than the rest of you?"
I will answer:

Baby girl what they don't teach you in school is that the older you get the more gravity pulls at you.
Keeping your feet planted and your mind out of the clouds.
Life moves down instead of forward.

Bones grow frail and muscles shrivel up and weaken just like your ability to dream.
Dream of what you’re going to be,
"when you grow up" because,
darling this is it. I'm all grown up.
I am all I was ever meant to be.
My clay has hardened,
no longer able to bend and curve with the wind.  
Too weak to keep walking forward.

That is why baby run while you still can,
discover the world.
Leave footprints in every corner of existence,
because when you're as old as me your feet will be sore
and won't be able to venture deeper into the pockets of the universe.
Roots now bind me to this little house where I will keep moving down.

Gravity is too strong for me now dear. My skin has already given up. Succumbing to the mighty force. Falling away from my bones that lie hollow inside my cheeks engraved,with the memories too valuable lose after  lifetime.
So that when this world had
changed,
beyond recognition,
I will still hold inside of me the days that I spent in the sun .

As for my back.
Honey, the best thing you can have is a backbone ,
because when everything in this world in pulling you down,
you're going to need something
to keep holding you up.

My backbone,
a tribute to the years
I spent tiptoeing across
the coal beds of this life’s mighty fire.  But one day it will turn into a white flag of surrender.

That is when you know that gravity has won.
I will sink back into the earth
and maybe start again…

When you ask people

about their biggest fears

they’ll say things like

the darkness, failure, loneliness
but a lot of them will say change.
The idea that change is something

to be feared has always bewildered me.

Perhaps because I’m one of the few ones
who isn’t really scared of it.
I accept change with open arms,

even if it’s something that I know is going to hurt.
I think this is why when I went back 
to the place
where I lived for most of my life,
the fact that everything was still the same
scared me far more than leaving everything
I’d never known in favour of a new city.

Static. Same. Never changing.
Seeing the same buildings,
same people, with the same expressions
made me uncomfortable.
We run away from change because we’re afraid

it might destroy what we have.
But from the deepest of pain

comes the purest of joys.
This is about more than just me and you.

Change is universal. Change is the only constant.
Without change, there wouldn’t be caterpillars
turning into magnificent butterflies.
Without change, there wouldn’t be summer
turning into autumn giving out to winter.
Without change, there wouldn’t be the constant circle

of endings turning into beginnings.

No destruction and creation.
Shiva and Kali would weep in the heavens.
Without change, there would be no beauty.

There would be no life.
Change IS good.
It is the background noise of the universe.
We can’t ignore it.
One day, a hundred million, billion, trillion years from now;

when the earth is long gone and the last of the stars burn out.

Long after the the black holes turn to dust

and the dust turns to atoms
and the atoms turn to… nothing.

When the universe is just a sea of photons,
witnessed by nothing and no one.

When there will be no way 
to set apart the past from the future
We will listen in from the other side.

Listen. *Silence.
*
Maybe that is when will miss change the most.