Poetry

once more:

the living room is old but the paint is new

i fill it with lights and candles and people,

hoping it is enough.

but the lights are never bright enough

the candles drip and melt

the people leave

and the room echoes

once more

you:

in the gaps between living,

a blink of a breath

finds your smile that

cri

n

k

les

up the

shinesobright light

into small pin

-

points

speckled across your skin –

(that brief escape of your horizon soul

as unknowable to me as

the cocooning trace of your fingertips

on warm-weathered skin

– yet as familiar as the pearlescent underside

of my own eyelids,

i am stuck. to singwhisper

of your beauty in the absence

letters to myself:

dear past me,

i cannot wait for you to meet present me. i cannot wait for the both of us to meet future me. but do not wait so long you put off becoming. i know now every day brings on a newness that stretches us out from all directions. even the sameness brings a new repetition each time around. look for it and follow it until you grow into yourself.

yours sincerely,

present me

dear future me,

i hope dearly and feverishly that you look forward to meeting me. i hope you have stored those learned lessons in the little pockets of my favorite jean jacket, in the nooks and crannies of my old home and of my new home, in the next book i pick up. i hope you will pave the path for a softer sadness when i inevitably fall. i have already bought the bright red brick to lay down the road, and i eagerly await its mellowing into a worn brown.

until we meet,

present me

untitled:

in knowing mediocrity

toeing the line of the fallen

without ever having taken the leap

—a death sentence, all the same.

the tree:

wide arms and the slight rustle of leaves

a large capped shadow under which i sit

knotted waves of branches

and the dotted pores of tangerine skin

peeking out against

a backlit bright blue

chaos theory:
i am leaking, always leaking

i am leaking everything, that which is no longer mine,

that which escapes me once i am done with it

— into words and art and body

these privacies of mine, they cannot be owned

when i am gone, they will come with me,

knowledge that seeps into the dirt and the ocean and saturates the rainwater

and others will drink it up,

feast on the intimacies of my life, my worries and my joys

and it will be theirs, it will become theirs, and it will learn newold thoughts