to the love i fell in across the ocean, i am still drowning in you. -Amman

I love my name.

Well, my pseudo name.

The name I chose for myself, I am in love with it.

Not that I don't like my real name, that name is lovely. It lives in a palace with princes and stars ad magic, and I appreciate my mother for choosing it. It is magic, and I feel that fits me.

But my chosen name, my writing name, is a part of me too.

Grace Jordan.

It holds a pun and a dream and my heart all in one.

I always see myself as messy, clumsy, but not in the traditional senses. My mind is a mess and my actions are clumsy, sometimes even thoughtless. I am impulsive and too much of me for me to handle. I see myself as something far from grace.

Yet it is a dream. I would love to be poised and handled and stable and graceful. I want to live up to the name I have given myself, so in all honesty it is more of a hopeful promise than a pun, though I always write it off as one.

But I doubt I will ever attain that. Not being cynical, merely knowing myself. I love mess, I love spontaneity, I love the chaos that comes with living. I guess in a way I mean to find grace, find peace in the chaos, and be a stable mess. I know it all sounds like contradictions and complexities, but that's all I know, and all I will ever be. So I must work with that and make it my own.

Now the heart. Jordan was someone I lost long ago, and he holds my heart and always will. But I can still love, and I can still dance, and I know he would smile at that, so its all that matters. His happiness, and in turn, my happiness.

So self-centered, to write an entire piece about my name, right? Well maybe I am a little self-centered. Maybe I have actually learned to love myself a bit, and revel in my own glory. I love my writing self most, I think. And my writing self, in my heart, I will be.

Grace Jordan, reporting for life.

That's who I will be, secretly.

I enter the light that's in my mind,
I search and search,
If only you I could find.
I know when you look down upon me,
You see the pain & strife in me.
Why does it hurt me so?
When we lost you 10 years ago??
I search and I search,
In my dreams...
But it's never you I see.
This love is slowly killing me.

Copyright
♥Crystal Rose♥

you can't say that I was the one who kicked you out of my heart, when I spent months kicking and screaming, begging for you to come back to me. I sat, festering inside myself for days, and did nothing but stare at the walls that had a nasty habit of only showing where your fingers brushed against their sickly white barriers. walls.
I'll never forget the pleasant  cool feeling of the staccato wall of our high school,  pressed up against my back when you first kissed me. I'll never forget the day I wrote your name in the sand. I'll never forget the day that you built a wall so high around your heart, that not even you would dare to reach inside, for fear of falling in, and never finding a way out. I used to pretend that after the years, you'd let down your flowing golden rod hair, and I'd climb my way back into your soul, but I see now why they call happy endings like that fairy-tales. I loved you then, and I love you now, but you are no longer the bearer of my soul. you no longer hold my beating heart in your cold hands. I've spent weeks scaffolding the burnt brick built up about your breast, refusing to look down, refusing to see reason, to look to the crashing sea below me, but the trembles from your wrath shook me off and broke me down, and sent me plunging into the churning sea below. the powerful waves, held me down, stole my breath, broke my strength. It was what bound me. kept me in delusion. yet, it was bliss, and the choking vice around my lungs rid me of the hunger and the pain. I let myself drown in you, and drifted, broken, to the new shore. I allowed you to flood my lungs to keep me afloat. little did I realize, it was your iron grasp on my heart keeping my head above the waves. or was it my hope for you that held me up? was it my optimism of a better place that drifted me? I guess I'll never know.
it is with new legs, and fresh face, that I humbly walk these new shores, that I bear my heart and soul to breathe another lover's name, once again.

(a.m.)(e.a.h.)
08/19/14

Sterling eyes close the falling red ward
Big Brother has seen it all
He tells me: there is danger
Terror past the massive, all-protecting Atlantic

Don’t stray there, the mouth
of stumbling heads say,
They want to take away
Our safety, our ways, our Freedom

Mr. Elected reassures
Nothing will harm you
Not with me going there
I don’t want you going there

He speaks like my mom
Warning me of the illicits
I am too vulnerable to experience
It’s death I’ll go to- I’ve been told

Sleepless red monocular
Enlightening the air to a passive blue
It’s opacity beneath and above
Ascending again

Mama and Baba say it’s time to go home
I confront the arid peninsula of Qatar
Lungs accustomed, vitality not frozen
Precariously perceiving the harmful

Sentiments of years past in Jordan,
I wonder why
my kin would ban this place
Rumor on dirt pavement in a draft, ears picking up

The Atlantic is not to be crossed,
A lack of morals, malintentions
lay beyond the scape.
Extravagant grenade above,
Falling to the horizon

And no detonation, collapsing behind a curved veil
Skyward lay the remnants
Of heat, frozen in time
The lips in a box on this shoreside

Warn the zephyrs from the ornery
Reaches towards our home
Be on guard of the deceitful
star at night that rains red

Tomorrow may not be there
My blood brothers of Lebanon say,
But I wait, field of vision
aligned to the east

Aural stumbles translate, articulating
My brethren begin their search of food
And in too many moments unnoticed,
Black on bottom, red on the low, blue slowly suffocating the obscurity above

your hair, is the grass that interconnects the world-- I am he as you are he, and he is we, and we are all together. I wish I could plant myself in your head and grow like your blonde roots (as you have planted yourself in my heart, and claimed your property), like golden rod. like golden rod, like dandelion, like daffodil, like sunflower.
your mind, is the collective thought and poetic compilation of every beautiful phrase ever remembered, written, felt, or forgotten. you are the deep thinkers of our generation, of our past, of our tomorrow. your mind induces a dreamlike coma-- I'm begging to be free of-- tose.
I forgot how to breath around you.
and on the seventh day, god created the terrain that is your face; sloping, folding, curving, freckled plains. carved out of the most precious and delicate porcelain, curving in all the perfect places-- high peaked cheeks, roaming down your nose, my feet leave sun peppered kisses.
I travel down to your full, shapely lips. warm and lively, they taunt me; I want to taste your strawberry kiss.
your chin curves taut over your featherweight bones.
I can't control myself when I reach your neck-- salivating over your creamy skin-- it's ungodly and irresistible (oh god, I want her).
your shoulders, something that I've traced over and over again. I've memorized your every visible curve.
she dips in all the right places.
my breath catches in my throat when I come to your unexplored crevices. every single particle-- I want to feel her soaked in sweat, I want to touch your softest skin.
"lupdub lupdub lupdub." your heart is pounding through your chest. we become one.
grasping frantically at your tiny waist, pulling them, pulling you, into me. I'm begging you to close the space between us-- the distance is killing me, my heart is slowing, my mind is deteriorating without you; I think this is what death feels like.
molding me into you, I bruise your body and you batter my heart. teeth grazing over your love. let me trace your body with something other than my hands. I'm tired of pretending this doesn't hurt.
believe me when I tell you that the desire to hear the panting of your shallow breaths in my ear is unbearable.
I may not be flawless, but I promise to try harder than all the rest.
dragging my lower lip over your sweet skin I draw in a deep breath--
lacing my hands through your hair I whisper in your ear,
"I lo-"
--crashshatterbreak everything is being ripped away oh god where did the time go what did I do wrong how could you leave why don't you need me who is that what isshedoingwhyissheholdingyourhandwhyisshekissingyourneckohgodohgo­dohgodohgod--
-st you."

And if the piano breaks it's because each time you kiss me it feels like I've taken a bullet to the brain.
Today, I looked into your eyes and saw nothing but forever.
I think that maybe, if you took my hand, we could fight infinity.

I've never believed in God, but ****, I think you're my religious awakening; THIS is a baptismal revival.
I think I was dead until the day we met- you give me life.
Whispers: "safe, safe, safe."
She strikes a key to play me out of tune.

What does she look like in the dark?
What do you wear when you're alone? (I wear the black pendulum)
Seastar, starfish, lover, oh how I'm suffocating on my anguish.
Convince me to forgive him, and then I will try and forgive myself for all that he has broken.
For the ***** nights, the rancid sheets, ten years of filth- it would take an eternity to scrub out my stains- ugly.
Whispers: "****, ****, ****."
Screams: "daddy please, daddy no, daddy no, stop it!"
It's hushed up by the sounds of the broken piano- the unforgiving black sacrament.

Steel and skin, forgiveness and pain.
You can only hide for so long; sleepmonger, deathmonger, counting sheep. When will these childhood nightmares end?! Oh.

So, 1, 2, 3, 4, who's that looming at my door?
5, 6, 7, 8, he calls it love, she calls it ****.
9, 10, 11, 12, he put her though ten years of hell.
13, 14, 15, 16, who could love her scars- so distinct?
17, 18, 19, 20, fall for me; so sick of running.

(a.m.) 05/05/14

I want to be your today.
I want to be your tomorrow.
I want to be your everyday, every which way.
I want to be your twenty-fifth birthday, spent alone with a bottle of bourbon.
I want to be the breath between your words.
The long flight back home.
The first holiday spent abroad.
I want to be the steaming cloud of breath, on a cold January, three years from the next.
I want to be the sheets at night; the flipside of your pillow.
The favorite restaurant.
The hole in your pocket.
The knot in your shoelace.
The freckle on your nose.
I want to know the story of your first broken bone
(If there was one).
I want to know the religious awakening.
I want to know the cherished childhood memory.
The playground bullies.
The third grade science project gone terribly wrong.
Tell me about how he broke your heart.
Tell me about how she broke your heart.
Tell me how to make it better.
Give me the insoluble remedy; give me the chance.
I want to be your unanswered question.
I want to be the first thing when you wake.
I want to be the last thing when you rest.
I want to know your deepest secret.
Tell me about how it molded who you are today.
Give me the light- give me you.

You exist between the books on my shelves.
You exist in each stroke of my pen.
You exist where my punctuation doesnt
(See, you were right there).
You exist in the unsung melody.
The bruise on my hip.
That trigonometry homework left unfinished.
Those lyrics not remembered.
I think of you in the morning.
In the morning with disheveled hair, and bleary eyes.
I think of you with the click of a pen, the turning of the page.
With the brakes of the city bus.
With the bell after fifth period.
With those fading scars on my side.
You are my first encounter with the salty waves of the coast.
You are my first encounter of a well-rehearsed routine.
You are the roots of my hair.
You are the cherished memory.
You are the only one.
You are beautiful.
You are genuine.
You are brave.
You are you.
And, you make me me.

(a.m) 04/21/14