Yes, You.

Upon a time, not Once but in a frenzy of soons and nevers, seated at the summit of my ever, I see into the tide pools of all the souls of your spirit.

As ages roam and wander the edges of sky, like waves battering the shores of All Land, you, and you, and you again are a thousand times lived but absolute in me.

I find you every time, in every essence of your life. Be you a grain of sand on a neverending shore or skin wrapped lover in my bed, I feel you, see you, know at every point where you wander in this universe returning us to totality.

I have lived all your lives. I know all you’ve known. I love all you are. From this life unto forever, I will find you in this great mystery of Everything.

The lonely place

You led me here where skies are
gone and winds blow faint and far,
where time has slowed between
two hearts and places far beyond

you match my step in rhythmic tide
my heartbeat in your hand,
such emptiness you’ve shown me
here near barren, quiet land.

Why do you pause to run your
hand into that lonely dust?
through greying earth where vacancies
replace the thrill of tempered lust

so you might stand among the
sorrows of this desolate refrain
and see the sins of all the ages
become the shadow of your pain

This quiet cold, it burns me:
I see your skin freeze under mine,
just let me follow further–
let me bring you back this time.

As far as you may wander, lead me
further through this waste;
unto a lonely summit
or the edge of time and space.

I’ll walk with you and sigh under
a fading melody,
I’ll gladly brave this emptiness
so I might fill you up again.

Around you

I took the eggshells I walked on
and made gilded portraits
out of porcelain crumbs

Plagued

Healthy, happy, to you there is only life
But one day I know you’ll be gone
and I’ll have to learn how to live without you.

When we go, we don’t come back,
and yes, our memories are sweet
but still they are unforgiving —
The spirits of limbo lurking in the dark
extending comfort through silence

I can’t hold a memory in my hand,
they are not cold, not warm
they are not loud, nor are they soft.
When I’m lonely, I can’t reach for you,
You will fall so deeply into my mind
becoming a chapter in my mythology,
a story I will tell to resurrect the past

One day I know you’ll be gone
and I am plagued by the fear that
your memory will leave a hole in me
that will fill itself with loneliness.

Separation anxiety

Her skin shines illuminate like
these ice flakes on my glass, but the
silver web streaks through the window
touch me cold when they burst over
my own face waiting for a flame.

I’m watching her. It makes no sense.
I can only feel the frostbite.
Shouldn’t I feel the sun like her?
Not a bite, but a firefall
of light piercing the jaded frost?

This glass between my fingertips
is chilled, trapped between two bodies
that burn under separation.
I knock on the window but she
doesn’t hear me, doesn’t know that

while she moves under yellow rays,
rivers of gold and garden walls,
my fingertips wither into
blue icicles and spread on towards
the cobwebs in the fireplace.

You left

I am surrounded by ghosts
whispering in my ear
and all they can say
is how much they love you

Cycles

You’re older than I am. Older than my mother is. Older than my grandmother was.

You’re always changing, every day, every hour, every second, of every moment. You’re like me in that way, I suppose. They tell me my body renews itself every seven years–seven years ago the person here now wasn’t even a person. She hadn’t been made yet.

You have a cycle too. Did you know that? They say your currents take thousands of years to surface then sink. The piece of you here at my toes, we will not meet again. Not unless I bottle you up and take you home with me but then, well, you wouldn’t be you anymore, and I think you’d be sad.

If I come back in seven years, will you recognize me? When a different part of you touches a brand new me will you know, or will we touch again as strangers. The part of you I met before sinking to the bottom of your depths and the parts of me you touched before they were scattered in the sand, will they still be friends?

I wonder if some pieces of me are breaking away right now. If my skin, my hair, or my sweat rides away on your surf–If they become apart of you. I wonder if your salt or your spray soaks into me and follows me back home.

Do you ever wonder if we change together? In seven years maybe you will no longer recognize yourself, and in a thousand perhaps my journey will still be in its dawn.

Ballerina

I just need a moment, please.

Let me lace these ballerina slippers

onto my feet so that I won’t trip

over my own words as I tiptoe around you

Just give me a moment

to practice my pirouette

so I can spin fast enough to hide

from that look in your eyes.

Taurus 2

She is the geode when it is in gestation
the ripples of prehistoric water
dripping dripping dripping
into crystalline spears and cabochon shields
A child born for war
ready to fight so that others might find peace

Of poets and premonitions

I believe me and Dante would have been friends

We would have spent long nights together
finding the bottom of aged Italian wine
making mosaics out of the fragments of broken bottles
the color of garnet melted into angels’ blood
We would have looked to each other to rediscover
the fire beneath our skin and we would have shared in
a sacred longing for a greater kind of love

We would have captured the light of heaven
through the red lens of Hell
We would have seen the saint
behind each of our sinner’s eyes
No judgement between the kindred,
we would have drunkenly offered our livelihoods to the Lord
and in a fit of amnesia left our vows forgotten
in pools of liquor and memories of laughter the next morning.

I believe me and Sylvia would have been sisters

We would have sensed in each other kinship
separated by fickle blood but united by fate
Our stars aligned by birth in the scorpion’s poison
and the annual chimes of the Orient
We would have spent mornings together
seated at a coffee table strewn with tea leaves,
crossword puzzles, and Tarot card prophecies
the smell of Earl Gray soaking into the pages
of words we need not share through voices

We would have sunbathed in the light of thunderstorms
speaking only in the silent breaks between
the lightning and the crash that follows
and when the storms raged into hurricanes
We would have followed the shortened pauses
into a well-tempered silence
listening to the prophesies of the storm clouds.

I believe me and Austen would have been lovers.

On spring days we would have shared secret
rendezvous among the willows and the pines
Her ink-stained hand would brush against me and
stain me blue like the wildflowers,
but for her such temporary scars would suit me well.

Our thoughts would often wander,
for we would seldom sing to monoliths,
but as her thoughts roamed through distant skies
and mine towards glints of starlight on the sea
we would find union in two very different kinds of heaven
We would braid the strings
that bind the constellations together
and read to them the stories of morning stars
and war torn women buried at the hearth of Sappho
The orphaned queens,
of martyrs and of melodies,
who wield scepters cast from hyacinth blades.

Smyrna Starlight

That night at the water
we drank at the top of the dune
and watched the shadows
of the western sunset
ferry the night over the water

The moon rose over us, getting fuller
as we filled ourselves with drinks
and secret messages in the sand
Wine pooled behind our eyes
and as we got drunk
the horizon blended into abyss and stars became
the only anchor between sea and sky,
And we were drunk, you and I,
as angels kissed the constellations into the sky,
and mermaid scales washed into the shore with the midnight tide.
We sat on the edge of the beach, under the moon and stars
and every which-way-cliché,
and we let the shrinking shoreline wash sand into our bathing suits
and mark us as daughters of the sea,

Quartz dust sugared our skin for Luna to taste,
her light on the waves a clever front to kiss us while we were preoccupied
by our tangled words slurring between bouts of laughter
We knew the tide was high when we could feel the ancient current flow
under our skin, chilling us and showing us what it feels like to be champagned over ice
Our wine turned to salt, red Bordeaux blending with the blue,
and as our glasses emptied of drink and filled instead with sand tannins and ocean spray,
the periwinkles underfoot began their burrowing, burying us into the night
among the sleeping riptides and lullaby waves

Leo

She is the summer and wears
sunburned cheeks with grace and pride

She is the feeling of being at the crest
of the wave just as it’s about to break
All that anticipation—the water at the
moment when it is at its highest point
of essential, potential energy

She is the hottest temperature
and highest peak of every fire
that ever was, though only the
omnipotent gaze of Hindsight will ever know
just how high her highest point reached
into the air, and how red its ember was
as it sparked against the paleness of the sun.

She is a living memory
A breathing legend
the brightest thought in your mind
which desires above all else
to eclipse the Others that vie for its place

She is the rings of Saturn
the crown of the queen
and the peak of the mountain

She is not the lion
But the glory of its mane

-Leo

Untitled 5

For all that is worth saying
for all we have to hide,
For all that is before us
and all we leave behind

For all the missed adventures
we passed up on our way,
It is my dearest wish, my love
we live for what’s today

Libra

She is undefinable like a paradox,
how something can be true
yet impossible at the same time
How life can come from death,
How Death can force us to live

She is the unbridled rage boiling
in the pit of your stomach
over answers you know to questions you don’t

She is in the solution to equations
you find yourself solving every day
The answer flowing through rivulets
of ink smudges and equal signs

Sometimes, she is the hesitation when
such solutions lead their way into newer
more difficult problems. Ones our cognition
has not the ability to unravel

She is the spirit world we
understand and the physical one
we don’t — the secret behind why
we cannot know where an electron is
and where it is going

She is the balance created
as two people meet at the apex of their love,
the string which binds their hearts,
The polarity which binds their DNA
and the vow they read as two become one

She is not the scales
But the tension of its balance

-Libra

Taurus

She is a diamond but not one
that glitters in store front lights
She is raw carbon with weatherworn
facets that reflect the laugh lines on her face.
Her home so deeply rooted
in the cavern’s walls that the chill
turns to warmth in her arms

She is not the seed but the flower
bud inside that is far, far too contented
to leave its shaded chrysalis,
And only when her sister buds bloom
into the colors of the earth
does she release herself into new
uncharted skies among soil
that smells like cinnamon and pine

She is the feeling in between the moment
when the fighting has stopped
and the peace is finally realized—
an unconscious satisfaction
deep in the belly of the mind

She is the resolution to every story
that has every brought you joy,
She is the fantasy you created for yourself
whenever a story gifted you with emptiness

She is the spring rain
but she can just as soon become
the Eye of Jupiter,
a raging storm that has
claimed a home by force
and an Absolute desire to live,
Sooner to rip the planet apart
than leave her stormy comforts
for the shadows of the unknown

She is not the bull
but the hands that grasp the horns

-Taurus