A Letter to the Galaxy

I wrote a letter to the galaxy today
Just to tell it that 2 stars had moved to a better home in your eyes
And I postcripted a question to God
In case you really were an angel
You didn't understand what I was writing
But as you laughed
I can understand why the stars flung themselves from their thrones
As if the only thing that held them up were broken yo-yo strings
And when I look into you and see the star that sparkles each pupil
I sense what it must have felt like when they collided with your eye
With the color of a golden butterfly wallowing in an Oregon sunset
It was too beautiful
It forced the lines around your giggling eyes up
Like a sandstorm kneeling in prayer
Yet even when your eyes are closed
You lullaby my traveller's heart to sleep
With the violin and cello duet of your eyelashes
Blinking
You put me at peace like a jazz chord that sounds more like summer rain
Evaporating
And then you let me swim in the floodwaters of your kiss
Drowning you in it
Just so I can save you
Filling your lungs without air
So you know how I feel when you aren't beside me
When you smile
I want to hold you
Like the big dipper holds the sky
I want to dip into that infinity
And find even more time to hold you
So I can squeeze you like Orion's belt
Let me orbit you like Mercury, you
You can be my sun
And I know i'll get burnt
Because I'm way too close
But I don't ever want to know what it's like to not feel your warmth
When you die
If I can still breathe,
I will blow your ashes into space
Where they probably ought to be
And you can trail the back of a star
And I will wish on you
Crash into the sun
So I can dream you ever into my tomorrows
And every time I open my eyes
I will realize
Just how much you take my breath away.

Your smile

The first time you loosened the hinge of your lips and smiled in my direction.
I sacrificed myself to hope
And tried to drown in it—
Just to see if hope can still float
I want to float on your dreams and never let go.
Darling you are the lone tenant in the galaxy of my mind
You embody the entirety of my subconscious
So even when you aren’t in my arms I can still hold your hand.
And we will dream-date above the clouds
So it can never rain on our parade
Beloved, I want to be the sole proprietor of your ring finger
I want to love you ‘til our bodies sing songs our mouths don’t yet know the words to
And relish every moment of silence
Because I know it’s simply that we haven’t had the time to make up enough words.
And in that silence I want to hear your heartbeat and your breath like your first name and my last
At last
And let our hearts beat to the rhythm of one drum
So that together, together, standing next to you we could be music.
Let us love like a flood
Kissing with open mouth
Sharing the same breath we can live our lives under the water on your inhale and my exhale.
Let our teeth shatter with the weight of our kiss,
And I will die for you daily to prove I will resurrect in your memories—
In your thoughts                                                                                                                                                                
And your dreams.
Crucify me on a cross of myself
And let me bleed every lustful thought of everyone else
Bleed every other woman out of mind so you can fill me only with yourself.
Tattoo my name on your lungs
So I can be all that you live for.
Carve yourself into my smile so you will always be in my conversation.
Pierce me with your soul and shatter every mask I’ve ever put on
Like a 12^th bottle of whiskey
And when I run for them keep your eyes open
So I can always find my way home in the light house of your iris.
The first time you laughed.
I melted.
But you fit me with myself
Now fit me with you
Like two puzzle pieces and pray,
That as time sands down our edges we fit just the same—
And pray that God adds this sawdust to the sands of our love-story
And you can be piglet and I
I will be Pooh,
Because I have a thousand daydreams
And not one.
Not one.
Is without you.

A love poem

I want to be the leader that deserves the following of my shadow

To lead you as well.

I want the surface of your heart to be found with my fingerprints

I want to be the rolling stone you can't resist turning into rock

Your rock
I want you to be able to stand on me.

When it feels like your drowning

Breathe and know it’s only my love.

I want to be the sole proprietor of your ring finger,

To be the lighthouse that forms the sparkle of your eye and always guides you home

And we can be piglet and pooh

Because I have no daydreams that don’t include you
And if you live to be a hundred
Let me live only that too

The first time we said hello

I took all the butterflies hurling themselves down the corridor of my stomach

And I put them in a jar of my uhms and mumbling and handed it to you with my head bowed

Because I saw too much in your eyes

And yet you relaxed your lips and smiled at me

And spoke to me

And you’re voice was worth all of my nerves

No one makes them feel like you do.

And that first time when you spoke

I sacrificed myself to hope

Crucified myself on a cross of my dreams hoping to bleed into yours.

The ones in the day

The ones you could act on.

Darling act on me.

And I would bet the reason you always wear a coat,

Is because you wear your heart on your sleeve

And I want to hold you and make it a part of me

And let our hearts beat to the rhythm of one drum

To the tune of my knees when we kiss

And the strings of your eyelashes when you blink

And let it be the drum-line for the greatest song of our time

Let it never play a last song.

You own the whole property of my mind

Consuming even my unconscious so I could see her in my dreams

And stand beside her in the day playing the music of our love.

I give myself up to be next to you.

Your Beautiful

Your knees shake like Native American tambourines in the sunset. You shiver like an autumn breeze on a street in Brooklyn. Your hair waves unbounded by the wind. It carries you off. Your eyes; they are too half-moons that almost but don’t fit together. That have seen too much shit in the world to sparkle themselves with hope. But your body is a war zone covered in Never-land lingerie and when I touched you for the first time and felt the infinity of your scars, I swore I heard them shout at me. With a malady of hate like a praying mantis his head halfway eaten by his wife, and you didn’t move away. I don’t know how this will end. If my love can carry us both if you can learn to love again. Because I would carry you across the ocean if you let me because when we kiss breathing in and out we could live days without coming for air. And I don’t know what you're feeling or who you are thinking about on those nights when you lie away from me in a dark corner of our room trembling like a leaf, when the scars you bear screech in your soul and you wish God let man live alone. When your past hits you like a train coming from the wrong direction and carries you off on bad memories and old feelings. But when you drown in your tears because the icicle shell you’ve formed begins to melt and water seeps into your scars and floods into your heart, I’ll be there. I want to be the tree that makes sure no matter how bad you shake I will fling my roots further into the ground to hold on and when you blink with the orchestra of your eyelashes and kiss me with reckless breath and sharp tongue and I feel you pour into me and bare the soul in you sneaking out, I will promise you I will be there. Because even though I don’t know how we will end I can’t see my days go by without your face close to mine and one day I want to read the wrinkles on your face as the greatest novel ever written and I want to watch you cry a happy tear. And see a shooting star so you know that flying can sometimes feel like falling but that you can never love too much and when you feel empty like a vase I will fill you with the sweetest lemonade since you don’t care for wine and I will kiss you with you kissing back. I want to wish you into the sunrise so that you know how to get up after you fall. And I want to bless you with my fears so you can bandage them over your own and I want to find what makes you smile most and etch it into my lips like a tattoo so that every word I say would sound like you are beautiful. You are beautiful. You are beautiful...

In the Name of "They're Christian"

This should not be taken as an essay or a position or a vignette. This is merely a rant.

Sometimes as a Christian in this tolerance-turning world we feel a sort of pressure to promote Christian art and Christian artists and chick-fil-a and any other person or company willing to slap a bible verse on a cup or close on Sundays or play Christian music or say that they pray or an athlete who points the proverbial finger to the heavens. And all this may be good in the ‘us not supporting sinfulness’ kind of way, but what’s the middle ground? How seedy does a great song or artist have to be to warrant a boycott, how unmerited does a Christian song or artist have to be to not forgive him because he or she sings or plays or writes for Jesus? It’s not that I necessarily have a problem with this first question as there are songs that I don’t listen to because they take me into darkness rather than lighting my way, and I think this list of songs is different for everyone but is surely not one that can be exclusively genre based or one that can be a list of songs to listen to because there are way too many edifying, powerful, bold, telling, and truthful songs out there that to create a list of ‘do’s is too small a thing. It’s this latter question that has been much the struggle for me as a 17 year old soon to be 13 year-running Christian school graduate with a church and family walling me in with whatever heaven, hell, punishment, forgiveness, judgment, or mercy they need too to keep me within those walls. For the most part I haven’t wanted to live outside of those walls but only because my ultimate goal is living inside God’s will and when that fits in the walls it works great and when it doesn’t...well…it doesn’t.      

 Neil Gaiman in a commencement speech said that his life was entirely centered on getting to the place (he called it the mountain) that he desired to go, and he said that sometimes he had to say no to good jobs because it would be taking him away from the mountain whereas if those jobs had come earlier he probably would have taken them because they still would have been closer to the mountain then where he was at that time, but sometimes those very good things if they are the wrong choice can be very bad things. Christian music, Christians in the arts, Christians in sports—it’s all wonderful…done right.

God is glorified when anyone raises their voice in praise to him— even so far as to promise that one day the rocks will cry out if we don’t. But does that mean every Christian ought to be a singer or a musician. Certainly every aspiring athlete that does their best does not make it to the pros, yet those that do get inflated to demigods and skyrocket to stardom on the wings of religion. Similarly, I feel that as Christians we forgive poor talent in the name of Christ when what we ought to be doing is praising Christ for those with talent and praying for these people to praise him as well. I am tired of turning to the Christian radio station to hear a 3 chord song screamed by an average singer with lyrics that are so shameful I’d think it was a different God. My Jesus is not a deity fitted with appropriate words only the explicit ones and the imaginary ones can get at his majesty so why do we forgive these artists for shanty songs? Because they said Jesus in it? Because they have a good testimony? Is that what we pay for? Because I’m tired of hearing Jesus’ name on bad art. Jesus is not the good that makes bad art not bad he is the good that makes sinful songs and sinful people’s actions reflect glory to himself. That’s my Jesus

Your Voice

I’m tired.
Tired of writing so many love poems for someone that doesn’t exist
Or at least for someone I don’t know yet.
So instead I’ll write about your voice.
I’ll write about how it is music
Music that drowns out my stuttering
You, you breathe like a symphony and you speak like a song
A sultry mix of strings you have yet to go wrong
When you talk with the wind each word is just strong
enough.
And when I reached for you in infinity and could pull out only this voice
You shattered me soon after I believe
With the sound of silence
With the evaporating sound of you not speaking
Into me
When you talk to me you take each piece
And with the intricacy of eternity you mold me back together
From the ends of eternity you gather me and fit me with myself
And that’s enough
For now
Because I have run out of dream to keep making things up
And your voice melts me
And then floods me with sweetness
Drowning
In a sea of your smile and your words
I haven’t to say if I lived before but I know not like this
Not like now
In each moment you’re here
Playing orchestras in my ear
Without fear
And part of me wants to kiss you
But then I’d have to bear the silence
With you not there to make such amends

As to open your mouth and fill me

With the one thing you can--

With your voice

Life's Short (especially if you're an ant)

I ran over the top of an ant hill today with my lawn mower. It was the 2^nd time in a row I had done so with purpose, though I run over it every week regardless in order to cut the grass. I sat and watched as hundreds of ants scurried from their caves widening small holes in the surface like an inverted meteor shower scampering on top of each other with a unity about them arming themselves to fix their fort (from my intruding blow) with alacritous speed and burdened backs. I came back around the circle of my side yard’s mowing circuit to see about half as many ants  as before still working like crazy even though I could no longer see the imprint of my tire in their mound. I thought about how disheartening it would be for the ant to work so hard to rebuild their fortress only for me to knock it down every 7 days on Saturday. Does the ant know this pattern? Can they predict when it’s coming?

The average ant lives only about 40 days which would allow them to see their hill destroyed only 5 times at what would feel like 12 year intervals for a human. I thought that maybe I shouldn’t feel bad about it (after I convinced myself that it may have been a little more vindictive than necessary). But then I thought that perhaps just once is enough to ruin a life. Even an ant’s.