Instead of an ER

The perfect storm.  The rash on my forearm.  The heart on my sleeve.  The black cars in a line.  The cold air against my cheeks.  I'll distract myself from enjoying life.  I'll choose the controlled silence over the unpredictable rushing wind.  I'll run toward the cliff and then stutter for the last few moments before I jump.  I'll tell you how I feel as soon as I know how high the cliff is and how deep the water will be.  I share more than enough because I have too much to share and no one listening.  No; you are all listening, I'm just not comfortable starting.  Open me up and I think you'll wish you hadn't cut me there.  Perhaps you ought to have aimed for my vocal cords.

The dead skin scraped off of my arm didn't even leave enough for a scar.  I'm afraid of my fingers and the death I live in.  I'm trying so desperately to stop time or reverse it, but my efforts are futile.  My heart is shaking within me.  I don't want to be here.  I want to revert.  I want to stand still and see the clock move backward.  Where are you?  Where will you be?  Shall I write you?  Will you here me?  Is my more than enough too much too soon yet?  Stab me before it's me.

Dark Clouds on the Horizon

I can sleep the day away like it's lightning from a cloud.  I can dream my life away and not get an ounce of rest in return.  My days are nights and the knight has left me.  I'm in a sullen state of mind and no tears satisfy the river stream.  I have far more than enough in life and all I want is to not want more.  My desires are stuck on fast-forward while my feet won't budge from this wet cement.  I'm a stunted, shifted, stained glass dream and I have nothing to prove my existence.  I need the commonalities of others around me but I don't let my feet turn circles even.

All the words hover circles around me.  People go about their lives and I ask people to push me.  When the time comes, the push shoves, I cry out from within in despair.  "Do not touch me!  I'm fragile.  Handle with care!"

I exploit my emotions as I'm going through the motions.  I tilt my head toward corrosion and listen for explosions while it's the inside that's convulsing.  I'm nothing short of nothing.  I'm the poison inside and I'm the reason to hide.  The dreams I flee to just leave me wanting more.  The dreams I flee  are shattered fragments of myself.  I cannot fall asleep myself and wake up someone else.  I cannot live a dissipated existence and hope to find indulgence in the mundane.  I cannot meet a dress inside my bedroom window.

The words aren't flowing toward the ocean now; they're pushing me upstream.

Potential

It's the first of the year.  And isn't every day with You?  Not to put on the rosy tints, but I know You've got this.  Nor will I put on these soggy wet goggles.  I've got the letter P coming with me on this journey.  I'm an empty balloon that often thought it had already exploded but I've just had the wind knocked out of me a couple of times.

I'm making it now again.  I'm waking up and preparing to take flight.  Please don't melt my wings unless it's necessary.

To another,
     If you're going to say no, I need to hear you say it, so I can move on with my life and find a mutual yes.  I know I haven't asked you, but the question has been bubbling for months now.  We have been nearing a boil for months now.  Steady streams lead to rushing waters or dry up in empty river basins.

Nowhere left to run

You're everything I'm not.  You're the bullet and I'm just the shot.  You have wings and my arms are fraught with scars and bruises.

Why is my narrative composed of holes in the dark and worn skin?  Why do I sit alone in silence hoping for someone to come in?  All the decisions I've tried to make today feel empty and fickle.  Productivity tells me I'm not doing enough.  My inner insides tell squeeze at me like a clamp.  I want to flee from here.  I want to be okay with who I am.  I want to disappear and return as a new start.  I'm not suicidal, but the times just seem to be rolling waters.  What am I doing for others?  What am I doing for myself?  Am I really that cheap?

As the rest just pair off I wallow alone, as if drowning under sheets.  Alone, I've grown accustom to the things I hate about myself.  Hate is too strong a word; I'd never use it on anyone else.  I can't be myself though.  I can't be anyone.  I'm an imitation.  I'm a counterfeit representation.  No one here knows me because I don't want to admit to who I am.  I don't want to be myself because when I try it just comes out as trying to get something else.  The things that I say seem to be self-exploitation or attention seeking.  I'm not comfortable with myself and I despise comfortability.  I'm a thousand arrows pointed in different directions as the infinitesimal wheel of time rolls down the rocky stream.

Abandon the broken glass and you'll find me.

I want you to remember me.  Will you hold me?

Glowing Shadows

If and when you become a ghost, will you pine for me as I did for you in this life?  Will you haunt the shadows just wanting to be seen again?  Will the shivers down my spine be your tender fingertips?  Will you tell me you're still here?  If and when you're an invisible phantom will your presence still linger in the four chambers of my heart?  Will you dance under the moonlight, spinning tree limbs in the park?

If you're destined to be a whispering vision that is only felt by my third eye, will you tell me that it's you or will you just pass me by?  When I'm floating in a dream and your eyes are fixed on mine, will you crawl under the covers and simply pass the time?  You've haunted me my life entire and barely eluded my grasp.  You're a picture frame without a photo or a face without a name.  You're not a bank from which I withdraw, nor a vault where I deposit my intimate secrets.  You've eluded me because whenever I get close I notice my breathing and catch my breath while my heart's beating.

I'm a light fixture caught up tangled up in the branches, a flickering filament with no desire to burn away the leaves.  I'm a teapot seeking water, but my chamomile is sufficient.  Flowers and aged root have served their time in the soil and now await the scolding, purifying liquid.  Hot water doesn't burn me, it mixes and melts to make the perfect engine.

I'm a faraway land with no one beside me and I'm an inner peace that is hiding inside me.  I'm a bat among squirrels that fly by me.  I may not be sighted but my sonar will guide me.  The gifts I've been given will not ferment inside me.  I mustn't try and hide the gifts that You provide me.  I'm a whisper in the breeze and a blade of grass in the meadow.  Soon to the fire or perhaps in the storehouse you'll find me.  Until then, I'm translucent stained glass painted with pictures of Paradise.

Tell me who I Am once was.

Brief Incongruences

There are words I can't tell you because I don't even know if they're real or not yet.  There are words that have been dancing on my tongue's tip for months now.  It's never the right time but somehow we have to seize the day.  I come home every night with bags growing under my eyes and yet my eyes are sometimes further down the road than I am.  I find myself worrying about unnecessary battles because I want to be prepared and then I trip over my own two feet.  Then I study my shoelaces to see what I could have done better, only to miss the point the true point because it's already hovering over the horizon.

I want to tell you the words stuck inside me but I need more time.  I want to live today but I need more rhyme.  I want to not want so much but this lust is killing me one day at a time.  I shall not be in want, right?  So how do I practice such a word or proverb?  I often find myself becoming a product of the trees planted around me.  I haven't always wanted to be placed here.  The last couple of years have felt more like enduring than really living.  I tell people that I'm trying to make the most of it but I don't try as hard as I would like.  It's easier to stay inside.  It's much more simple to complain about the heat than it is to fix the air conditioning or to even turn it on.

I'm hurrying in my life to make things happen and then I rush into the important decisions.  I closely examine the pencil shavings and eraser marks and paint over the number on the account balance.  My eyes are far away and my hands are too close to my hips.  I need replacement surgery but of nothing in particular.  I need a motivational drive to keep me moving.  If I am to stay anywhere, it ought to be moving.

I'm nearly falling asleep and this has become next to nothing.  The ideas ran away again, perhaps they're hiding in my dreams.  A few sentences became sketches of oases but the rest seem incongruent, bland, and without substance or flavor.  I'll come back if God wills it.

Seat of the Muse

You cannot get lost at a museum.  Walking around as the paintings draw their gaze to your face and away from you, you're more likely to be found.  If you're lost in the artist's cathedral it's because you were before you entered.  A museum will show you where you are, it will bring things out in you that you weren't aware were there.  I'm not talking about a field trip with friends or a family vacation with relatives.  A solitary visit to the talking halls will open you up to where you've been.

I recently meandered the hallways of old warehouses converted into artists' studios set up for public viewing.  The views were quite spectacular; the conversations sometimes came easy, but I found myself missing you.  That has happened a lot lately.  I want to tell you that I love you but I'm not sure if I do.  I want to tell you that I feel something but I'm not sure how you'll react.  I want to know how it will be but these things are painted with uncertainty.

I feel so at ease talking with you.  I want to continue.  As I'm driving down these weathered and worn streets I find my mind turning to the passenger seat and wishing your hand was there in mine.  I'm wishing for the slight gentle touch of another, but not just anyone.  These imitations don't do it for me; I'm just creating an interference in all of our empty signals.  You don't know what you mean to me.  We've gotten to a place where I can speak of your external beauty, but what I mean to say stays inside me; it's inside you.  It's something I don't know how to describe.  Usually the inward beauty comes from a different place but your intellectual skepticism soothes me.  The problem is that it also scares me.

I don't want to be serenaded off to the gates of Hell.  Are you a siren lulling my heart to a treacherous shore?  My soul found an olive branch in this coral reef and I don't want to let go.  The people I don't know tell me not to go.  The people who claim to know me don't seem to react precisely as I anticipated and so your siren song seems all the more pleasing to the ears of my heart.  I write words in my journal that I wish your ears could hear.  I fill once empty pages with musings of what this alleged love tastes like.  I don't know how to tell you because I don't know how you feel but I don't know because I don't tell you.  I'm afraid.

I'm afraid that your heart will fly further.  Your presence continues to escape me.  If I told you what I felt but that I'm not sure about how I felt, what could we do?  I'm frightened that you'll leave me before we even have a chance to enter into each other's lives.  I'm anxious that you'll tell me not now because your life is papers and faraway places.  You don't have time for love, you can't be tied down, but that's not what I want.  It is not my desire to bind you with ropes and chains to any one place.  No, some of that is the very reason that I've found myself falling for you over these last several months.

So what would really change?  Not much really.  Maybe we would just talk with more intentionality.  Maybe you would just know more truly how I feel and we wouldn't have to fish for answers about what the other is feeling.  Yes, perhaps it might involve making a more concerted effort to actually see each other soon but that's okay, right?  We're both swimming in this lonely fish bowl.  We're both lost at sea.  I don't have this life all figured out and I think you would say the same.  To be honest, I don't want to worship you and I don't think you would like that either.  I just want to live life alongside you.  You intrigue me.  You keep me guessing.

You're such a profound thinker.  It sometimes seems as if everything you say gets me thinking more and it's not the kind of thinking that sets me off on a runaway train either.  You just take me to worlds I never thought I would go.  Perhaps you're not a siren serenading me into rocky shores, but an explorer looking for a companion to accompany you on a lifelong journey full of new discoveries.  I don't want the monotony of this life.  I don't want the same potholes deflating my tires.  I don't want the same faces always telling me how I ought to live my life.  I know that living as an independent celestial body orbiting others won't work either; there must be a healthy amount of accountability.

Something inside you pulls me closer even as you travel further.  I don't want it to just be absence-induced affection, though sometimes it feels like that's all that it is.  Nor do I wish for you to be a mere comfort in the dark, though these last few months the sun has often refused to shine.  Nevertheless, I remember times with you and how something was lifted even when you were with me.  Even when I didn't know what to say, there seemed to be something there.  When other silence fills me with anxiety and uncertainty, your silence somehow keeps me wanting more.  More of what you are.  More of who you've been.  More of where you're going.  And more of where you'll take me.

I wander the once empty warehouses and find myself again.  I find you in every landscape.  Every portrait is you singing poetry with me.  I wonder what you'd think and where your mind would be.  I think that you'd be so pleased, you'd be in your element.  You're not a looker or a gawker but a gazer. You've changed something in me and I want it to keep evolving.  I don't want to leave my chrysalis because I fear the fire might be awaiting me, but I'd rather live a full life than spend my waking hours sleeping.