Take countless photos, when the mood so inspires.
You may as well have not even thrown the shutter.
For the things that move you right in this moment,
Will not adhere to the chemistry of film
Will not flip one single electronic switch
Cannot be stored, except in the mind,
(A shoddy storage medium)
For the sight of your face,
Your beautiful otherness
Mingling with me in the air in between us-
( As you try to pick my nose… )
Your head is on my shoulder,
Heavy with sleep
And trust, always growing,
As your eyelids drop lower
My arm, sore, bends to raise you up.
I’m relishing the time
To be quiet, close, and still.
When I can find, in my heart,
All the words that mean something,
Not tossed about casually, in the noise of the day.

Confidences
   were something we shared, but then,
Secrets are nothing per sè...

Confidence
   was a thing that I'm lacking, but that
Never stopped me, anyway...

I pressed you, you starved me,
It was wrong, but it couldn't be helped.
I said some things that I don't quite recall
You said a few things yourself.

It was a ridiculous assumption, and god **** it,
You're right.
Forgive me if I don't always hear your advice,
Or look away from the truth.
I'm still listening, I swear it.
I'm afraid you might think I'm just here for your ***,
Or afraid you might think that I'm boring and dull.
I'm just beginning to learn that others perceptions,
Are all, as they should be,
well beyond my control,

But, still...

Your eyes of ocean depth see me,
I want you to speak my name.
Searching all my cliches in the dark,
Forgetting the lies from which we came.
But what if all my words are true?
What if they show me the way?
What if the light between oceans is thought,
And words sufficient to make you stay?

It's a ridiculous cliche but, ******* it, your eyes...
Forgive me if I don't always make eye contact,
Or look away too soon.  I'm listening. I swear it.
I'm afraid you might think that I'm full of myself,
Or afraid you might think that I've no self-esteem.
The truth is much simpler than either extreme.
The truth is I'm somewhere right in between.
but still:
Twin seas draw my stare and I fear what I'll say.
Fear falling into their unlit depths, where even my silence could betray.
The source to illuminate and fuel our lives' desires,
Find it in her hands , her touch,
Find it in her eyes.
Her eyes of ocean depth see me,
Giving no safe place to hide,
Searching bad cliches for the light, the otherness inside.
But what if all of my words are wrong?
What if they drive you away?
What if the light between oceans is mute?
Insufficient to make you stay?

Perhaps you’ll remember,
though most of us don’t
recall our earliest days.
What relative scale could you use
to describe the things you saw
and the things you felt?
It seems too unreal for a mind
you would one day call mature
and an intelligence
deemed sufficient.
If you could, would you choose,
and what would you find,
if you could retrieve these moments?

when a warm, familiar heartbeat
kept reassuring time,
in a comforting bed at blood temperature,

when hands twice your size
would cradle you completely; move you
from bath to crib,

when loving giants would come
when you called,
to sing or to soothe your pains,

when sleep held dreams of this and more,
in a language we all have spoken,
Beautiful to hear, forgotten on waking

Raise, for your experiences, a city.
Build a warehouse, down the block,
Where you’ll keep the cosmos.
Build a bookshelf, within a brownstone,
Where some other things can go.
Like the time you grasped a flower,
Felt beneath, felt the spines that
Pricked your skin,
Made you cry.
But that shelf will be revisited many times,
In this fragile, crumbling zip code,
Forsaking more majestic memory palaces,
Because the vision reached your soul,
Through pain,
Of all that beauty, soft, red, enfolded into itself,
On such a slender stem.