Your Hands

Your hands are cold.

But they are soft

Closing

Opening

Folding

Praying

Your hands fit perfectly inside mine like the underside of a boat

We float

Your weaknesses covered up with my fingers

Connected

This union is endless

Sometimes when the world is too loud

When your eyes are too beautiful to look into

When it feels like time is slipping away

I reach out and grab your hand

So I can enjoy saying something without words

Saying I am fragile

Saying I love you

Sometimes I hold onto your hand too tight

It is because I don’t want you to disappear

When time sands down the puzzle pieces of our fingers

When it bedecks our hands with wrinkles

Like someone who stayed in the pool way too long

I will still hold your hand

Still weave my fingers inside yours

Locking them into place

Listening to the echo of the silence

Like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell

Conducted with sound waves

To the rhythm of raindrops and beating hearts

The first time I held your hand

It was wet

My hands sweat like an equatorial noontime

I was nervous as hell

You pretended not to notice

You grazed your long left forefinger on my palm

As if my hand could melt any more from your touch

And best of all there was a second

And a third

I held your hand this morning for the 4,982^nd time

When I hold you tonight

When I stop kissing you to reach for your hand

When my fingers finish their tango with yours

When they slide into their place

In the valleys of your knuckles

When they squeeze you one last time to make sure you're still there

When they open musically, like an accordion for air

When they let you slip away

Hugging the space between your fingers

Letting go

Defying before we sleep

Any thought of not being we

4,983

Vampires (a question poem)

Maybe the reason vampires live forever is because they never have to see themselves in a mirror.

Maybe it’s because the dust of deceit can’t rest on their skin
They never have to wake up thinking themselves in a different age.
Never forced to paint themselves for a judging world
Modest out of necessity
Because sometimes the truth is too much to leave bare
They sniff out the lies of the masses like fresh meat
Chasing it down with alacrity
Biting the deception from the jugulars of the adolescent
Bleeding their own truth in
Sucking out the falsities that define us until we shine.
Truth glitters.

Do You Hear Her

It’s her Birthday today—

They don’t keep track

In a culture that’s more about building houses than making homes

Always growing out and never growing in

She has only a fake fireplace

As a candle. No cake.

Confetti.

The shrapnel of a broken family.

She sits in her room with her door locked

IPod in to drown out the domestic abuse she never passed out as party favors.

All of the silences when they aren’t around.
 

Do you hear her?
 

She sits in the back of the class

She has seen too many masks and heard too many fake laughs.

She lost her own long ago.

Leaving only black eye shadow

Like paint

To cover her empregnant eyes to deep for any other color
 

She wears hoodys and bracelets

Failing to hide the shame of her scars

Refusing to be called on

Too many people have walked on her opinion

Her wings are clipped

She no longer believes in flying

Just getting by and...

Hoping that she only has a little while left

Before she finds a decent way to die.

Searching for the right last breath.

One as dissatisfying as her life
 

Do you hear her?
 

She speaks with the scent of alcohol in the  stagnant air

Dripping herself out of her wrists

Longing to cover herself up

Fully convinced the only way was drowning.
 

She is tired of being wanted like a victim

For her waking up is something

Breathing, not nothing.
Every second she makes a burdened and conscious choice
To re-enlist in this debauchery of life
Only out of fear
Not dying is her life
The passion is dying away
 

You sit in the front of the class

Making bad jokes

Whispering your loneliness away.
 

She hears you.

 

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...