Rain.

That calm feeling that can only be achieved with a determined breeze and hazy horizon. The trees shiver from the thought, welcoming the change. In a heart beat the wind grows violent as the relentless downpour begins. Most people run and hide, others draw their shield; I bite my lip, giddy inside. The delight from the pelting drops and swirling air as each drop find it’s own home; in the trees, on a roof, or with friends in the bay. But, it is never the performance that entices the audience, it is the anticipation before, and the memories after.
As the clouds approach, the air turns, leaving a resilient smell of warning; the day becomes balanced, calm and serene. It starts with a drizzle as the ground begins to slowly change color. The wind pushes you along, whispering to stay and play a bit longer. Light grey clouds tell of a gentle shower while darker ones warn of an approaching storm. Water never hurt anyone, you were going to take a shower anyway; why not stay and listen to nature as she pours her soul down to the earth?

Comfort.

I want giant sweaters, loose pants, and moccasins. I want the wind to blow, fierce and howling, while I nestle down in the nook of comfort. Crack open a book. Feel the spine crinkle beneath tentative fingers. Reach out- there. Barely within reach is the cup of hot chocolate, or coffee, or something.Whatever it is, enjoy it. Maybe someone enters the room, and curls up where I haven’t. Perhaps not. Either way, I know that there is a world waiting for me. Perhaps not within the pages of the novel I’m holding in my hands, but instead, in the future. My mind wanders- skipping from class to class, from accomplishment to defeat. From that joke that cracked me up the other day, to the euphoria of receiving rewards for hard work. Then, thoughts scatter. They bounce between the liars, the abusers, and the needers. Those who never give back. But wait-what was that right there? Hatred? No, not anymore. Reach a little deeper… apathy. Wonderful, brilliant apathy. The band aid for feelings. Why has it taken this long to realize that respect is what matters most in the world? Respect is what keeps animosities at bay, persuades opposites to attract, and draws the cautious towards the flames. Flames. Fire. Logs, crackling and whispering nonsense to velvet coated ears. Blankets tossed about tangled legs, protruding toes. Comfort.

Perfection.

It's a moment of absolute perfection; I don’t know anything more intense and beautiful than two people, madly wanting each other but still restraining themselves because the tension is too flawless to be broken.

Paper Boats.

I fold my memories into paper boats
And watch them sail a short distance
Before they sink,
Each one reappearing in a book
I always carry but never read.

One day I hope to tear away these pages
And fold them into a shape
Which resembles a dream
Then watch it fly away,

Never to sink
Or return to its numbered order,
Just carry itself to the horizon.

Daydream.

So what do I do today? Daydream? It seems I always am these days. Constantly finding myself laying about the house with you on my mind;  imagining what you would do if you were here beside me, what you would smell like, how your lips would taste. The hours spent in waiting, the visions in my head. You're worth it. So until I see you right there in front of me, I’ll be happy seeing you in my daydreams, my dear.  

Before you knew you'd know me.

Expression.

My life feels a bit hollow without music these last few months. No pianos or guitars being played around me, so I've spent more time thinking, writing, dreaming. I'm coming to discover that I am an expressionist- not a member of the early 20th century art movement originating in Germany (although the article I just read on expressionism was fascinating), but rather someone who thrives on releasing the things that are inside of me. I believe in the world that is around me, but I find myself flowing through it most easily when I can express my mind and my emotion and my soul. Openness is so essential to who I am. Discretion, of course, is an important obligatory factor: I can't tell everyone everything. In fact, some pieces of my soul should never be shared. I have secret places that I treasure very much. Some of them are embedded within songs- the rise and fall of melodies splashing over each other, triads and inversions mapping the twisting passages of the language of my heart. It is a messy kind of expression at times; even with my words, I cannot always find the right vessel through which to speak. My thoughts, as with all thoughts of mankind, are incomplete: the edges and illogical ends are propped up and forgiven by emotional matter, by intuitions, by spirit. None of these exist in their full fledged form outside, not in the warm air, not in the impressions and judgments of those people around me. Of course I am misunderstood: are not we all? But the beauty in life, at least as I have come to encounter it, is discovered when expression meets expression, when hearts are warmed by other hearts, and when humanity is kissed by the sustaining wonder of eternity.

Importance.

Isn't it funny-

The importance of words?
How one syllable, 
or one
flighty exchange of letters
or the 
tempo and the rhythm
could change a meaning
or interpretation
or the fluidity
in a heartbeat
and take a lifeless mess of

messy phrases
and jagged images,
transformed into
orderly, well-polished, fluent works of art -
spoken of the mouth and mind?

Played.

You played me
like the fool I am.
You placed your lips
around the roots of my soul
and breathed
so softly that it
excited a melody
to resound
throughout my lungs.

But your heart never desired to be
one with mine.
You simply liked the way
I could pick you up
and love everything
you hated
of yourself.

Her Radiant Limb

I have never had a song bring me to tears before like this one. I feel as though, if I were to be a piece of music in a another life, I would be this song. Thank you, Mother Falcon.

Never Seen.

The next time you are walking down a familiar suburban sidewalk right as the sunset is fading, stop. Stop dead in your tracks.

Don’t worry about seeming silly. Don’t watch for supercilious stares. Stand still. Not at an intersection, nor at a mailbox, nor at a lamppost. Stop in the middle of a step that you are expected to finish. Stop, and if you blink your eyes and still know where you are, stop that, too. 

     Just stop.

     Stop and imagine that you have been dropped from the sky to where you stand. 

Stop, and tell me when the air starts to get familiar. I am curious. Does it take months to get to know, does it take in it to grow?

I will return to childhood bedrooms that seem as foreign as they once flowed, brick like bones and painted veins that once signified home, so let me ask you, what’s the difference between the first time you laid eyes on that birthday gift, what’s the difference between old wrinkled lips and fresh ones pursed to kiss, what’s the difference between the stoplight you pass every day to work and one you’ve never seen or heard, 

     or felt. Cold, stagnant, scintillating. 

See, I am midthought and midstep ambling past State Street as usual and I walk into a thick wall near an alley. At first I wonder, is this okay? That’s what our social conceptions have done to our freedoms: convert them into anxieties, is this okay? I allow myself an exasperated sigh and glance around, and then, I stop minding them, freeze, and take a look around. 

     The next time you are reducing everything in your life to the past, stop. 

I tell myself that I have never walked past this place before. The building across the street, the power lines and the slope, the trees across the way and the parking lot stretch, I have never experienced this town before. The buildings refuse me and I let them, diaphanous things they’ve become, I stop looking at them as if I know them by name, convinced that they are generic facades on a typical small-town street. It works. This scene, this could be from anywhere, any picture, any movie. My memories of this place might set it apart, but what good is the familiarity if it makes me skim over? Is it not indolent for me to stop seeing, to stop noticing? To look at things and see the past but not the present? 

We think that it would enervate our world-weary minds to treat old things as new, but this is a lie. It enervates us to stop seeing and to stop wondering, to stop learning like uprooted hearts still beating with bewilderment. 

So, I let it feel new. The bricks and arches, the spaces in between, the crosswalk and the lawn extending left of me. It feels so new that I am hopeful I might break out of my bridle with teeth snarling, hooves stamping, and mind reared. It feels so new that I am afraid I am lost completely; that if you dropped me here in a dream I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or gain my bearings, wouldn’t be able to find my way home. 

I hate that memory is a blessing and a curse like this; if it was one or the other, I’d have my answers. Instead I stand in the dimming summer air, simmering thin, wondering if I have been spending my entire life trying to be someone else without intending it. Taking after someone else’s clothes, someone else’s lines, someone else’s style, someone else’s home. I don’t want that. I’m standing here in the middle of the sidewalk and cars are passing and people are walking off in all directions and I’m looking at the cement in front of me like I’ve never seen it before, and all of a sudden this is when I feel more independent than I have felt all my life.

     It is a short moment. I am unhooked. I am original. I am vast. 

     So it follows that in all the other moments, I must be a slave. 

As far as the fear of the unknown goes, while I’m pausing on that sidewalk afraid of getting lost, I can still raise my head to the sky and inhale as deeply as I want. I do not need landmarks or welcome mats. I want novel lights in bygone dawns, and only your billets-doux to anchor me down. Olfaction, see, is the greatest trigger of memory; and for me, it’s all the ones that I want to keep, and so if I’m dropped like a needle on a record I can’t recognize, I will trace the air for the scent of your skin. And besides, this is what new experience is about, after all—to change yourself and go back to the start so that you can find, there, everything you want. 

Blink.

Sometimes I blink and when I open my eyes again, I see my thoughts through a detached lens as they pass through my head, and I realize that above all else, I am waiting. That is my natural state, a state of enduring the present while craving the future. I circle in a holding pattern, assuming subconsciously that one day a stranger will press a key that unlocks everything into my palm.

Sorry.

How am I supposed to function when my muddied but loving boots are not making imprints on anyone’s souls? I keep stomping around, bound to the loudness I hope someone will hear. Hear to say, “Stop. Come inside, I will make a cup of tea.” I am not meant for hostels and half-romances. I am meant for trips around the world and lengthy novels written solely about the beauty and fear behind your hands. Hands I only wish I could find. Mine keep searching for you behind blackened keys and dried-up pens, but I only feel heat running thin. I try to look back, but there are these spots in my mind. What was his laugh like? Did he really mean to speak those words? They are dissolving from my grasp; water pouring out between my paled fingers. I have not much left, Lord. 
Why was I given the need to love so greatly when all it has done has broken off what’s left of my fractured body? Why is it there when all it has done is make people run? What good is it? Damnit, I sit here crying because I lack the strength to dare to leave this place without another glance yet too weak to be on my own. The one that let me feel safe. My prince who brought about passion. And the only person that ever cared to understand the real me. What good is it ripping my heart out from my chest and handing it over just to get it right back? They are probably all debating whether to put their ‘wasted times’ returns back onto their debits or visas. “Sign your name here,” I will point, “and you will get a full refund. Terribly sorry about the troubles.” I am so terribly sorry.

Mirage.

I have a wonderful view right now. A view that not only excites my eyes, but my mind and heart. It’s nothing I’m familiar with, yet everything I know. It’s like a sweet aromatic view that lures my senses in. I smile slyly, knowing what my emotions are getting into, but I let them explore the view. I introduce my body to this feeling, a feeling it never fails to recognize. Its dangerous and enticing, and a big part of me doesn’t want to acknowledge it. But it’s as though my body, mind, and heart are doing everything and I’m simply a spectator. I watch the way it recognizes the different attributes of this view, and the way it correlates it to what it’s known before. It’s mysterious, and the mystery is precisely the reason behind its attraction. It examines this view doubtfully, yet it wants to deem this view different than all the others. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my view is blurry. Reality sets in again, and clears the blur, dictating that my view was simply a mirage…a mirage of what will never be again.  

I wonder what it's like.

I mostly wonder what it’s like to be written of, to know what I’m like behind that thin veil of admiration. I've been painted, sketched and photographed, but never written of. Never that thing that yanks at the strings of my heart and means something from deep within the core of me. I wonder what I’d be like, how I’m seen. I wonder how richly it would strike me to have the ink of another’s words wrapped around my body like a sheet. I wonder who I am in print and how strongly I’d be written by someone else’s hand. I wonder if it’s a joy I’ll ever know. 

I've fallen.

I fell half in love with a lot of things today.
I fell half in love with the snow that swirled chaotically, without a direction.
I fell half in love with the voice of a man who sang too often of the things he was unsure of.
I fell half in love because I understood what it was to write too much of something you know too little of. 
I fell half in love with the boy I've only just met this school year, his eyes and his hands and his everything and the we that we could be. 
I fell half in love with the smell of cookies baking and the heavy lidded feeling of a lazy morning. 
I fell half in love with the feel of bare feet on cold wood and of watering eyes in the stinging February air.

I fell wholly in love with being alive.

Pocket Holes.

There was once a girl
That carried the weight of
The world in her jean pocket.
But those jeans began to rip
With every step she took
Down that bumpy gravel road,
And before she knew it the
Burdens she kept with her
Were sprawled out, smeared all around her.
That road she stumbled down,
She realized it was cold,
And in the fragments of all the broken things
She couldn’t find a single
Thing to keep her warn.
So she sat on the curb
For years upon years,
And not once did a car
Pass by.
It was just her as far as
She could see,
Alone with the weight of
The world
Lying before her.

Thought.

Talking in circles, I am dizzy and my head is spinning. I have been looking for something to pass the time, a pair of lips to kiss, a hand to hold, a face to memorize, but I am coming up short and leaving myself with nothing more than blisters covering the pads of my dry fingertips, the ones I have bitten down to practically nothing through this anxiety and stress and

“I look at you sometimes and you look like your thoughts are miles off,” he told me and I brushed hair out of my eyes and assured him that this was simply not the time to make accurate judgments. He believed me. 

My eyes hurt. I can’t open them wide enough to see light. My hands shook for thirty minutes last night and I couldn't breathe, I was ready to tear my chest into pieces and let my lungs loose so that they could find room to suction air on the floor. I swear to god, I haven’t had anxiety this bad since I got off that medication. Instead I just sat in the back and watched the second hand on the clock slow down more and more until my skin was crawling. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and was surprised when I didn't throw up in the sink. 

Coffee.

Sometimes I sit alone with a cup of coffee and don’t think at all. It’s nice to have a blank mind and an engaged palate. When my mind is always going somewhere between full tilt and some speed probably considered a low level felony, nothing is more relaxing than a cup of coffee on a sunrise. Or a sunset. Or the middle of the night, drowning in all that liquid moonlight. Any time is a good time for a cup of coffee and emptiness. Would you believe me if I said I hated coffee up until a month or so ago? 

Captivating.

Touch.

I love my hands. They do everything. They touch and they hold. They push and they pull. They are the beginning of a friendship, or a smack in the face. They control why I (we) do. I wouldn’t know what to do if I ever hurt my hands. I love to draw, and I love to write. Not only do I love the work that my hands do, I love their ability to touch. I love my sense of touch.

 I love walking through a fabric store and letting my hands run along the aisles of fabric. The feeling of running my fingers across a new book, preparing to turn the first page. The slight pain, but then instant relief of putting my hands under warm water after being outside in the cold. I like the feeling of smooth hair between my fingers, the first breeze of sweet spring air on my skin, and the feeling of cool water on my body. But what I like the most, is the feeling of touching someone else’s skin. Its intimate. Comforting. Loving. Passionate. Pure. Genuine.

I love the most obvious forms of touch such as, being able to lay in bed with someone and feeling their fingers stroke my back. The feeling of being pressed up against someone else. Being held on to so tight, thinking the feeling will never go away. But it’s funny, because the most simple forms of being touched sometimes means the most. Someone stroking your face, and pushing your hair out of the way. A hand on the middle of your back that says, “I’m here, don’t worry”. Even the simple embrace of a hug means so much. I trace the lines of your face. The softness of your eyelids, the curve of your lips, the sharpness of your jaw. Touch. 

Overwhelming.

Life is overwhelming. I can feel it all around me, my senses are going wild. My emotions are overwhelming and no matter how hard I try, I can not yield my feelings. I’ve kept it all bottled up inside for so long, and now it’s all flowing out; never ending. I’m so aware of my surroundings, a laughing child, the cool wind chilling my cheeks, the whisper between two lovers. I can feel it all. I can hear it, sense it, taste it, touch it, see it. Everywhere. My mind is flooded with feeling, drowned in awareness of life. It’s all so real. It’s so beautiful, reaching in, touching me, as I beg for more. Wanting so much to know the freedom I can find if i just let go, let it take me away and allow myself the freedom to breathe once more.