tucking flowers behind your ears
watching the sun dance in the sky
waiting for the air to clear
i never want to leave your side.from this hill we see the town
i twist my fingers between yours
to keep myself from falling down
because your love my soul secures.and when the earth begins to shake
fear will not grip my stuttering heart
because with you i know i’m safe
though the world begins to fall apart.
I’ve lived my entire life
squeezing myself into pockets
working so hard to shrink,
to be smaller, to take up less
space– to give others more room because
they’ve always seemed more important
to me than myself.But when I met you,
for the very first time
in my life, I wanted
to take up more space:
in your heart,
in your mind,
in your life. Uninhibited,
I opened my floodgates and let you into
all of me,but you pushed me away
when you weren’t willing to share
yourself, and I could feel myself withering,
shrinking,
closing up like a clam shell.I’ve lived my life torturing myself by working so hard to shrink.
I am so sick of asking you for more space.
We’re masked in clever conversation.
Witty remarks.
Perfect metaphors.But poetry is not always
the set of fine china your mother
keeps locked in the cupboard.
It is picking through skin
and meat and getting to
the bones– sucking out the marrow.And sometimes it is the stench
of decaying bodies.
Sometimes it is the taste of
someone else’s blood.
Sometimes it is supposed to
break you.And we are not flowers– we
do not give off warm perfumes.
Sometimes we are fingernails tearing
through the yellow wallpaper.
Sometimes we are covered in
scars (inside and out).
Sometimes we are our own tormentors.
Sometimes we are the pain
we write about.Don’t you see?
I live with my hands permanently
dirty, covered in everyone and
everything I have ever
touched.
The rhythm of
life is dictated by
ticking clocks.
ticktockticktockticktock
But my life was not breathed
to be conducted in the duple meter
of this mechanical march.
I was made from the
undulating ebb and flow of tides, the swaying
of outstretched tree branches,
the rise and fall of the universe’s chest,
the very same cells that bend
to dance with the wind.My heart cannot beat
in synchronization with wound-up gears.
There are strawberry fields between your knuckles
that crack and bleed when you close your fist.
But you won’t wear gloves, you won’t wear mittens;
you say you love the winter’s kiss.Even when the rest of the world has hidden
underneath the frosty snow and ice,
you stand outside with your arms wide open
and tilt your head up towards the sky.Though your hands and legs are red and numb
and the snow and sleet begin to fall
you won’t come in until you’re frozen
because then you cannot feel at all.
language fails to express
the most profound darknesses of the heart–
the small cracks between the fertile soil of the
soul where only God goes.
There is no one where I am,
seeing through these eyes or
hearing through these ears, or
feeling the darkness in my stomach.
In all that I am,
I am utterly, darkly, alone.
Sweet one, who taught you that you are not worthy of your own love? Don’t you know that once you’ve realized your worth, you are infinite?
the atoms i am made of
are mostly empty space.
what does that make
me?
you are a pond
in the dead of winterand i heave myself at you like
a stone that shatters
the still surfacesending splinters echoing
through the ice
like small electric currentsi unsettle
the mud that has lain
tranquil at the bottomand i turn the water brown
i scare the fish
away.
I knew the lonely parts of your heart.
They were my campgrounds
when my walls began to burn and
the ash and smoke threatened
to suffocate me beneath my
crumbling ribcage.When it was winter in my heart,
and my veins became
frozen red rivers,
you always had a fire going
in yours.
I would huddle inside the
crevices between
your atriums and swim in your
bloodstream until I, too, was red
underneath your skin.
Silenticel 