Innocence,
Is...
Cocoons.
Keeping, caterpillars captured.
Keeping, fragility concealed.
Keeping instability confined.
Telling ambiguity it is necessary.
Telling in-culpability it is beautiful,
Until the day you gain consciousness.
Transcending into a butterfly,
Because when you learn how to fly,
You will never stop spreading your wings..
Your cocoon will seem, like it was just a fragment of your imagination.
Your mind will flutter, like a humming birds wings.
You will thirst for knowledge, like a bee for the sweetest nectar.
Your heart will love, like your natural instinct to sore above pinnacles.
Your lows will be depressing, you will stear clear of polluted capital cities.

Metamorphosis unravels your full potential.
Dancing rainbows...
The world is vast place,
And you will explore every inch of it..

Leaving home is no longer exiting the address attached to my paperwork.
The walls that contain my childhood are a time capsule full of spoiled memories.
The bedroom where I prayed away scary monsters is now a skeleton of myself with transplanted hobby attempts by my mother.
The rearranging of furniture, the shifting of pictures, the emptiness of space and claustrophobic piles of clutter in the closets push me outside.
Outside, where the trees grew with me and kept me shaded while my imagination transformed the branches into jungles or utopian planets ruled by female playmobile.
My mother laments at the clutter and space we hoard while my father would be happy as long as his tools are untouched.
Leaving home is like entering into a comma, and every time I wake up I've lost another memory.

Say it
Say it, you must
Red Wine and bread crust
Last supper in your home
Last night in your town
Last memories with your loves
Things will be different now.
Say it
Say it, but not yet
Not until you've nothing to regret
Jump in the river one last time
Walk the streets by starlight
Sleep sweetly this final night
In your own teal sheets
Sing the song of your adolescence
that of four years gone,
Will this night to go on and on,
To Infinity
Bite your lip, hold back the tears
Run until you lose your fears
Come to a screeching halt
you're face to face
in the Vineyard,
sacred space
In the Vineyard,
           Say Goodbye
In the Vineyard
           Say Goodbye
Salt water makes for sour wine
Quickly now we've little time
In the Vineyard
           Say Goodbye
Paint your eyes black
and greet with a bitter kiss
You never thought goodbye could taste quite like this
Sever your ears and bury them in the bank of the river
Bring forth the memories and shiver
Sever your ears so you can't hear the sound your tears make as they collide with the concrete
Curse the beauty of these streets
Curse the comfort of your sheets
Sever your ears and bury them here
Because you owe this place a piece of you
You made a vow you knew you could not keep
So bury them,
          Bury them deep
And bury them well
Grow long your hair so they can't tell
Rely now on sight and smell
and hold forever
your final memory of sound
the green waters rushing over this sacred ground
Maybe you'll come back someday.
But now, there's not time to waste
The guards come quickly to tear us apart
I loved you fully with my whole heart
But now it's time
Whisper tenderly your final lie
In the Vineyard
      Say Goodbye

i consume black coffee by the steaming mouthful
so i can stay awake long enough to do something useful
i am playing a waiting game with my feelings
but i have never been acquainted with patience
the way i admire so much in the humans who love me best

maybe all we all require is the opposite of what we are
to fill in the space between your fingers
is exactly what you can’t hold onto.

anyway i miss your mouth.

he says don’t get too comfortable
i say it is not in my nature to do so

this is a man who stood on the edge of the mountain to make me laugh
and moved across the country three weeks later

he invited me in to see his stained glass window
but i had work in the morning and anyway his hands felt like

the roots that grow out of potatoes that you leave too long in the cabinet
knobby and altogether alien, uncomfortable and unyielding.

he plays with light and i have nothing to do with it
no emotion compared to Popsicle Boy or to the ever-logical Elbows.
(i thought i should bring him up because i love him)
but he let go on the day that I was concerned with the pottery wheel
and it was graceful and unimportant at the time

now its all a wash
and i miss the clay hidden behind my knees on the days we’d climb up to mountain for ice cream and giggling.

As you reach a mountain’s peak, your weight slightly decreases as you get further and further away from the Earth’s core and gravity loosens its hold ever so slightly. If you have ever felt this tiny change in more than a physical sense, then this is for you.

This is for train tracks and box cars, this is for every road we planned to trip but never departed, this is for the difference between August and October and the first snowflake on my sister’s freckles a whole week before Halloween.

Because nothing is as sturdy as uncertainty. Nothing is more constant than the ever changing blues right before dusk in the summertime, where the deepest blue is just over your head. It’s the untruth of the moving target and the integrity of the unlocked window and driving through mountains during a snowstorm on Christmas morning to be home in time for my brother’s favorite joke, but I take the turn too quickly and spin my mother’s car into the woods.

Because I can only trust something viscous and permeable, and there’s this moment when you first see someone push their hair out of their eyes, or take off their glasses that is so identifiably human that I can’t get it out of my head.

The arrangement of my mother’s garden isn’t one I remember because I want to. I remember it because it held her hands when I couldn’t and the hockey game on the car radio wasn’t important because my father said it was a playoff game, but because it was a place we could exchange our thin ice for someone else’s.

This paralysis of analysis lives in the heart of transitional phrases.

Getting lost in a city that wears me too well

A man yells and a well-dressed older woman smokes a cigarette

and I turn left on fifth.

If you took a picture of this city,

an instant of stillness

no one would be able to tell if it was falling apart or coming together.