big hands and feet

you have big hands and feet.
in fact, nothing i do or say could possibly change the way your hands and feet make me giggle inside probably because they are awkward and foreign and domestically challenged. so i hide it.

i must say, i think i like you that way because only i can see that you're not meant to do particular things like clean, or kill, or sew tiny bits of string back together from parts that you accidentally broke off, but felt bad about the moment you saw them scattering off into the wind. you're a kind human. the kind that feels bad about bits of string flailing away on a sad day. little things like that keep me here wondering.

you use your fingers in ways that are strangely barbaric, in ways that are grotesquely perfect and too beautiful for the world we live in, or even too perfect for the most perfect word to be spoken about them in silence, somewhere in the dark out there.

to me, you are something prehistoric, something ancient that has walked the earth for centuries. a beautiful cave woman who could melt in my arms and teach me beautiful things. to them, you remain this perfect thing misunderstood. your thirst to create something beautiful, alive, goes unseen and unheard.

take me in your big arms, come back and hold me someday, after you're done roaming the earth, combing the corners of eternity in the days and months after her. after them.

come back because your fingers belong inside of me.

the people we love

i don't even know you and i let you hurt me.
i didn't know before this moment that your soul was cold and quite possibly all shriveled inside.
you're peeling layers of yourself, shedding skin frantically to stop the screaming of your body, the pull towards something worthy.
maybe it was your hurt.
maybe it was her.
maybe the people we love before never leave. they're walking beside us as memories.
ghosts curiously guiding our steps back to them.
i don't want that anymore.
the crying, the pain, retracing where we've been.
i can't do that again. i can't go there to start over and die.

on scandal and success

on scandal and success,
where we all draw pain from the rivers of happiness
to remain the same as we've always been.
complacent and hurt.

on scandal and success when times begin to change,
we hold on to the bad to forget the remains of outlasting hope.
satiate
devastation.

on scandal and success when tomorrow seems like the remnants of a fading star.
we grab hold of excuses, justifying excess that seem to create beautiful images.
look closer and you'll see the decaying mass of democracy.

we destroy what we love because that's what we're good at.
scandal and success.

a circle

i remember the beautiful days when i found happiness in your embrace.
times of peace and calm in my mind that i call upon now when i'm surrounded by flames.

i remember when we used to sit in parks and watch each other breathe in and out, slow, daring each other to go higher in life, to move one step closer to heaven. and we'd make it. we'd fly up to heaven and look down into where we'd been, the vast desert of oblivion on the horizon.

we've flown away from each other, now. i don't know how it happened, but it did somehow.
i lost my footing and threw the outline of your skin out of my mind, sending who i was back then colliding with whatever has been set before me this time.
i don't know where i'm going anymore and i lost the map you traced on my body, that one time we said forever, in the park,
remember?

i've already forgotten what it means to hold you and cry, letting all my fears out onto you, down and through your comforting sighs, one by one, dripping memories into buckets of quicksand pulling me down farther and farther into you.

i tried to hold onto the pieces i grabbed as we quickly buried what was dead between us.
but even those, now, have turned crunchy and burned red and brown and dark.
flaking off like the dead bark of a once beautiful tree.
the tree of life maybe, now dead.

i fear i'm losing you each day i stare into my future.
each day i move closer to something without you.

tomorrow

people are dying out there.
body bits are flying everywhere without specific coordinates to land on.
so they casually land on the innocent because that's what body bombs do, they don't see the eyes of those they tear apart.
they don't see the dark future they impart on those who are doomed to remember these times.
they just land on people standing too close to the fire because that's just what body bombs do.

cloaking tyranny with confusion and hate.
their hatred sits and festers in their hearts like the memories of their loved ones dying projects over and over onto scarred walls.
it's great, now we can sleep sound in our lives so far away.
never batting an eye or flinching at the sound of someone else's baby dying.
it's hard to care when the violence is somewhere out there in the darkness instead of laying right beside you.
we don't have to see it, and those who look don't understand what it is they see.
who will remember their names tomorrow?

you can hardly see the peace, or hear happiness in the air anymore.
bombs are coming down instead, raining carelessly from everywhere.
every corner of hell.

there is no one to remember their names.

inappropriate love

i thought you were something you're not.
it may have been the biggest mistake i made with you, maybe not.
there were others, certainly bigger ones, ones that taught me to put my heart away. inappropriate love.
although, i can look back and reflect on a few that may have been monumentally bigger.

perhaps i knew everything you were the moment you walked into my life.
maybe i saw you for you right there at the beginning, but didn't want to see the pain that you'd give me in time.
a mistake.

maybe i didn't want to see the calloused heart, the beautiful liar. someone that took the scalpel and cut through my heart.
a mistake.

i didn't want to see what you could do to me when you felt trapped, or hurt, bleeding all over the place and into my lap. i didn't want to believe that you could hurt me like that. a favor.
a mistake.

i didn't understand