Yellow,
October LEAVES
A word slips out
The door
To haunt my trees
Pleas in gusts of
DON’T

Through trial & error.
I admit I was afraid to love.
Opening up felt tremendous.
Having known the fear of failure.
I was afraid to drown, admiring the ocean from a far.
The current which she dove.
She'd offer her ocean.
Currents pulled strong only she knew it's depth.
I lacked understanding.
Appearing to move closer,
At which point these currents grew darker.
I trusted myself, longing to become a single wave swirled in thought.
Focused on simple clarity.
I didn't want to be like the rest.
Knowing the beauty she possessed.
I feared drowning the most.
Learning to float.
The buoyancy of reassurance.
The things neither of us said aloud.
In the end it wasn't that I was afraid of love.
It was her that I feared.
Admiring from the shore.
The best thing I've ever known.
Diving in head first

listening out for the catch, through the ordered lines
then running into familiar counter-melodies
that hit the gut like surprise meetings with old friends

pushing against the current
you write the soul’s ebb and flow of discovering
break and breakaway, meet again

figuring it out along the way, slipping back,
humble, soft vulnerability of emitting,
rolling out in music and codes interior landscapes

So tired I have grown, of building castles
only to have them overrun by cresting waves.
So tired I have grown, of tasting water on my tongue
but spitting, complaining of its salty burn.
So today I take a dive,
for I've grown sick of the shoreline and
smelling life's salty scent only upon the wind.

So today I took a dive,
head first into that salty steep
and was pulled here by current arms
and pushed deeper by ocean nymph charms.

My body flung about,
counter currents tossing me in circles,
eyes itching red with not a second to blink
and my nostrils jammed full
of the salt that hinted my senses before.

On the brink of drowning,
vision fading from blue to black,
I am pushed to a surface
far from the shoreline from before.
A gasp for air and the seagulls call
beams of sunlight carefully fall
onto the white crests of traveling waves,
and upon my blinking eyes.
Here, on the bobbing wakes of erasing waves,
I begin my ocean days.  

I had become so tired of my earthly ways,
so tired of hating the cleansing dawns
hiding behind the ebbing tides.
So today I took a dive
and began my floating ocean days.

softness flows over
rocks and rivulets, jettisoning
the clouding embraces of treetops,
holding the modulating fog on brushed canvases:
away, floating away, currents of love.