I know you have to leave
By the time summertime comes to an end.
You'll have to finally get dressed,
Your bare silhouette won't peer out
From the bathroom anymore.
No more nights at the corner bar
Talking of your mothers suicide.
The first Saturday you took me
Into my first gay club,
You took me down under the floorboards
To a night of aching and desire.
I had no idea I could look into your
Emerald eyes the way I did
While seeing a reflection of an ocean
With your face painted on the surface.
that first Saturday.
But baby I know summertime needs you back.
You need to go back to the oceans
Circling islands with no names.
I'll see you again when the summer wants
To send you back to your home.
You'll let me feel then what it
Feels like to feel inside you.
I can keep on edge till then.
I'll miss the taste of your strawberry lips
The first time you let me
Strip down and undress my pride
In the pool outside your house.
Just tell the summertime you have
Someone back home who needs you.

I may be a universe away.
I might have traveled between the stars to reach the fifth dimension,
Only to speak to you through the voices I left for you on the wall.
I made it easy enough for anyone to decipher but only for you to pick up on the pieces left behind.
Trace it back to what you've always wanted me to tell you.
Delineate the way it was always meant to be,
The both of us growing old while the stars shine brightest at the darkest of night.

I'm here now, among the lines of time,
Trying to figure out my way back to you,
Trying to glide peacefully through each and every moment we ever shared,
Knowing I get to drift among these times in the stillness as they were meant to belong.
The good mixed in with the ugly makes all of this seem a bit more comforting, a bit more realistic.
The only true quantitive data I've been able to make up is that love will bring me back to you in time.
Let love flow through you when we part for I'll always be there and I'll always find my way back when you are freely open.
Don't think this is the love that's been created from the way we were taught,
But the kind that transcends time and space and has no true formula for figuring out why it exists,
Why it can't bend or why it can't stretch.
We have our own formula for how it works so that's the path I plan on following.
So, hold tight for I'll be back soon.

I walk closer to these cold gates,
No Virgil to help me get this far,
Only sin along the way.
"You shall not enter," he says.
I knew this would come of me,
But how did I get this far
Along in my journey only
To be rejected the first time around?
Did I not pray to see my own
Beatrice enough to seek redemption?
I journey all night through the
Dark wood only to go
The lonesome way I came.
I hope the place beneath my feet
Will take me through their gates,
I couldn't stand another moment
In between two worlds without
The one he'd call Beatrice by my side.

I can't stand the way you don't understand the light.
You imagine yourself painted in gold walking among sandy beaches as the tide comes in,
Sipping on a mimosa, biting at a croissant.
I imagine you think everyday will be like this.
Time grows a bit weary,
We go home,
We leave the tide behind, we can't bring the sand home, we have no space.
I'll be at my desk writing away at the next piece, the next big shot chance at trying to prove to you and the world I got it this time.
You'll go to work, you'll come home and
you'll tell me Sally isn't cut for the job but Andy, your boss, he won't fire her.
You'll look over my shoulder, think to yourself about how this one isn't going to be the big shot.
You'll tell me: "it's coming along well honey."
I won't here the sincereness flicker off your lips. There was no fire starter to begin with.
You'll crawl to bed,
You haven't the strength to speak to me in tongues.
I'll ask, "baby doll what's the matter?"
You'll tell me, "I can't stand this place. I can't stand the way the sunrises. We need to go back."
I'll tell you now, "baby doll, like Rick said to Ilsa, we'll always have Paris."
"We never even went to Paris," you'll say to me.

And in the light
The darkness shinned within you.

Drugged by your silhouette,
I overdosed in the river
Outside your parents house.
I had a vision that their house,
The house you never called home,
This would be where I find grace.
The roses your mother grew,
From the garden your mother built,
Would be the death of me.
I rolled them up, like I always did,
Let you light them for me, like you always did,
And let the smoke make love to my lungs,
The roses became a mosaic in my crystalline  eyes.

The garden turned into the river Lethe,
And I could finally let go,
And you could finally move on.

But we're here,
In a bar,
You at the counter and I at a table.
We aren't here together,
But we aren't alone,
And you look like the leaves of
A fully blossomed Cherry Blossom tree,
And I wanna kiss you,
I wanna take you to bed,
But you wouldn't want that,
At least not now,
Not after you lost me in the bar lights,
A place where we aren't together,
But a place where we aren't alone.

This isn't something or someone you bring home to mom,
This is a jaded piece of glass with a a fading cigarette dancing from his lips.

This isn't what you dreamt of from children's books,
This is you finding Prince Charming half unconscious in the gutter, a little too faded for his own well being.

This isn't your dad coming home tonight, or any night soon,
This is seven years of you trying to play catch with yourself in the yard but knowing you don't have the strength, let alone the will power to go the distance this time around.

This isn't the party where you kiss everyone with loose ends,
This is where you collapse on the couch at 4 from being love drunk, with a hint of whiskey on your sour tongue.

This isn't closing your eyes and clenching onto your rosary hoping God calls you back,
This is the devil picking up the first time around and telling you what you really want to hear, telling you to **** all your darlings by day break.

This isn't about peace to your superiors,
This is about claiming what was rightfully obtained in the ruins, shackles on your ankles and a rib cage with roses blossoming on the inside.

This isn't about equal governance,
This is about the sands of time knowing those who have vanished,
While the top see no one below.

This  isn't about a single deity,
This is about letting you freely walk these lands and not having to seek refuge from those trying to claim you and the temples you structured.

This isn't about the right of passage,
This is about our land, this is about giving you a home when yours lays in ruin waiting to be built up again, ready to be claimed.

This isn't about the war of the strip,
This is about letting those who exist claim who they are,
claim where they stand as a holy ground to their ancestors.

This isn't a war song,
This is for those born not of a home and still call the distance between two spaces the place where they belong, where they come from.

This isn't a holy war,
This is a war spell bound cluster **** of ignorance, allowing you to free the bomb drops but not letting you seek shelter during the aftershock,
We can run you to the grit but we can't let you see where we lay our heads for some narcissistic reason.  

This isn't about being separate from the path,
This is about paving a new path, about creating the new gap between youth and art.

This isn't about politics,
This is about birthing a new generation of equal representation.

This isn't about showing the world we care about women,
This is letting you know all women are power, the are our youth and our wise, they are our support beams and our battle axes,
Let them shine with the stars as they were birthed to.

This isn't an ode to love,
This is me telling you I love you.

Does he take care of you?
Does he ever make you feel like you want to go home?
Does he undress you on the page?
Does he undress you in the black of an empty room?
Does his kiss make you overdose at night?
Does he make you feel high even when you're dying to be sober again?
When he puts his fingers to your lips, does it make want more of him before he goes?
Does the need for his lips make you put out the cig that's always been bad for your health?
Does he make you feel full even aftter your parents split and you've felt empty since?
Does he make you feel like you can talk about you parents?
Does he calm your neurosis, even when you can't stop organizing your house and degrading your own body?
Does he talk about each part of your body as if each piece is their own Frida painting?
Does he say how beautiful your mocha colored birth mark on the lower part of your neck is?
Does he know how much you hate your mocha colored birth mark on the lower part of your neck?
Does he know how much you can't stand being up before 2 pm on at day of the week?
Does he know how much you wanted to **** yourself in 2012?
Does he know that was the year your parents started resenting each other and you blamed it on your never being home?

Does he know about me?
Does he know about how much I call you at 3 am?
Does he know I still love you?
Does he know you used to love me?
Does he know I know everything about you?
Does he know I know nothing about you?

I know nothing about you.

Paradise is the lost city of memory,
A place of eternal grace,
A place where those most sacred come for time of leisure escape;
When all is lost one will come back to Paradise,
It is here that one finds those that were once held in the highest regard,
With the dearest of sincereness,
Those memories held most accountable for dictating the direction of your heart,
This is what makes you come back to those tender moments of effortless ease