But can you love me in the deep? In the dark? In the thick of it?
Can you love me when I drink from the wrong bottle and slip through the crack in the floorboard?
Can you love me when I’m bigger than you, when my presence blazes like the sun does, when it hurts to look directly at me?
Can you love me then too?
Can you love me under the starry sky, shaved and smooth, my skin like liquid moonlight?
Can you love me when I am howling and furry, standing on my haunches, my lower lip stained with the blood of my last ****?
When I call down the lightning, when the sidewalks are singed by the soles of my feet, can you still love me then?
What happens when I freeze the land, and cause the dirt to harden over all the pomegranate seeds we’ve planted?
Will you trust that Spring will return?
Will you still believe me when I tell you I will become a raging river, and spill myself upon your dreams and call them to the surface of your life?
Can you trust me, even though you cannot tame me?
Can you love me, even though I am all that you fear and admire?
Will you fear my shifting shape?
Does it frighten you, when my eyes flash like your camera does?
Do you fear they will capture your soul?
Are you afraid to step into me?
The meat-eating plants and flowers armed with poisonous darts are not in my jungle to stop you from coming. Not you.
So do not worry. They belong to me, and I have invited you here.
Stay to the path revealed in the moonlight and arrive safely to the hut of Baba Yaga: the wild old wise one… she will not lead you astray if you are pure of heart.
You cannot be with the wild one if you fear the rumbling of the ground, the roar of a cascading river, the startling clap of thunder in the sky.
If you want to be safe, go back to your tiny room — the night sky is not for you.
If you want to be torn apart, come in. Be broken open and devoured. Be set ablaze in my fire.
I will not leave you as you have come: well dressed, in finely-threaded sweaters that keep out the cold.
I will leave you naked and biting. Leave you clawing at the sheets. Leave you surrounded by owls and hawks and flowers that only bloom when no one is watching.
So, come to me, and be healed in the unbearable lightness and darkness of all that you are.
There is nothing in you that can scare me. Nothing in you I will not use to make you great.
A wild woman is not a girlfriend. She is a relationship with nature. She is the source of all your primal desires, and she is the wild whipping wind that uproots the poisonous corn stalks on your neatly tilled farm.
She will plant pear trees in the wake of your disaster.
She will see to it that you shall rise again.
She is the lover who restores you to your own wild nature.

I am not invalid

I want to give you something.
So badly it hurts.
I wish I could tell you that the world is at your feet.
But you have to take the plunge.
You have to see it and seize it.
You have to be willing to be unsafe.
I wish I could give you my heart- not just because you already have it but because
You need its resilience, its unwavering hope, its blind courage.
Maybe with my heart in your hands you will have the strength to walk away from this gray, quiet life and spread your beautiful soul out upon the ground,
And grow.
And bloom.
And shatter this sky into colors with no names-
Colors I've seen swim in your eyes with the tears and the longing,
Colors I've felt slip from your fingertips and live in my skin when you touched it.
Oh, I want to give you my hope for you, and my faith that you will be
Incredible.

Oh, the people I've lost by being sincere.
So many, and I'm afraid you'll all march through my head
Every night till the day I die,
Always leaving,
Never giving a reason.
I am a reason.
This skin, these bones, a reason. I was born
A reason
To leave
And so the people I trust give none-
They need none.
Why?
Why runs through my veins with the blood.
Every look I give
Is why
Every word I speak
Is why
And why
Explain?
Why consider
When you can just
Quit?
I am the reason
And I carry that,
And I carry every time you said I wasn't.
(Until
You showed
I
Was.)