Nothing is as simple as it ever seems, and nothing ever will be.
You can say "I love you." or "you make me happy" without uttering a single word, and I think that's
the only reason anyone can make it past the age of twenty-five.
I remember being in third grade wishing I was made of steel and concrete and every other single thing that my father's knuckles couldn't break through.
I remember being young and putting conch shells to my ear because then you would hear the ocean, and I remember doing the same to my grandfather's grave, and how his marble tomb sounded like a hollow room with smoke rising upwards through the floorboards, and I see how even at our composition, we are flooded with what we cannot turn away from.
I see the power of finding more in things that you don't really understand, and that even something as soft as a voice can be my sweet tooth.  
I was once told that people are exactly what they allow themselves to be, and are defined by the things that they were given, yet decide to change.
So just know that I feel the time passing like wind sliding down my back, and I am carving softer ways to love you,
I am trying less to know you and more to know why.

Because the way tires leave blisters on the skin of the road when they leave too quickly, is the same way goodbyes scrape arms.
It is easy to devalue our breath, when we live in a world filled with flame, and coal, and ice which are not supposed to be beautiful, but despite their purpose, they find their ways to be.
It takes courage to pray to someone knowing that gravity can ****** your words from the air and bring them right back down to the soles of your feet.
So when we question things like Heaven and wonder if that big blue sky is another bruise on someone else's Mother's arm, we find much more than answers.
We find that people are nothing extra, they are only themselves, some simply more than others.
We are more afraid of a silent and a hushed love than we could ever be of one that oozes too many words, so I will continue quieting the world until it is time to listen.
So yes,
hell exists.
But I refuse to believe it is a place, and as far as I am concerned it is a moment.
It may be one moment or millions of them, but hell is real once you understand that the people who are supposed to love you like bandages that cover burn marks, seem to be pretty good at starting fires when no one is looking.
These are just things I was thinking about on the car ride home after I ran into your Mother in the grocery store.
She said you still walk like there is sand in your shoes, and I realized that being in places isn't the same living in them.
We have bad habits of getting up and taking a few steps toward someone just to say we were there, and I hope you are guilty of
loving me from within the distance.

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your *******,
the doubled purple
of your *******,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

there's something about the moon
you said it looks so pretty
but the way the stars surround it
is something which takes the breath of many
that was the night you looked me in the eyes
and i swear not a single force on earth
could stop the constant shaking of my hand
and the increased heart rate inside my chest
and though i'll never say this out loud
the thought of you in my head remains
and i want to meet you once again
your arms around me
as we embraced the cold
though the feeling of being in your arms
could never grow old