If Found Please Return

I found your heart on the passenger seat of a minivan in a used car lot.  The moment I approached it, my own heart skipped a beat.  Though so many would seek to put you in a box like a cadaver for them to make their own judgments about, you are stronger than that.  Your heart knows it was made for bigger and brighter things.  It looked out the window and saw the world beyond our scope of vision.  It saw other hearts driving with passion instead of being fueled by others' confining words and wishes.  Your heart looked past the horizon and into the potential of your life and that of others.

I saw your heart driven by ambition while you kept one hand on the wheel,not for fear of crashing but rather to guide the journey.  My key won't turn the ignition and somewhere deep inside I know that's for the best.  Still, the recent todays make it feel like the absence of any sparked concern may endure.

You don't know it and yet somehow, thankfully, you do.  I don't know if it was courage or foolishness that offered me the opportunity to share with you, but for now I am thankful.  I remember that more often regret stems from inaction than from missteps and mistakes.  So at least I'm learning to use my words.  Whether I have acted in a moment of courageous boldness or a whisper of premature openness, it's a new experience and a new way of becoming myself.  I'll be myself for the rest of my life so I might as well learn to live as me.  Thank you for encouraging to live my truth.  Thank you.

Only Parts of Me Shine Through

I was born into this culture.  Into this setting and all my surroundings surrounding me.  I'm a product and a processor.  I cannot change where I'm from.  I can deny who I am but that doesn't seem to help much.  I can wish to be someone else, but then what of those who do identify as I do?  What of the white male who cannot relate to the portrayals of ignorance, belligerence, and excessive hatred on a daily level?

It is true that I am often uncomfortable with who I am because of who I seem to represent to so many in this world.  Still I cannot paste a new identity on who I am.  I cannot become someone that I am not.  I can love others and try and speak for others, but I have learned that it is much more powerful to learn to empower others to speak for themselves.  We can all only relate our own experiences to those around us.  Even the second- and third-degree stories we share our filtered through our own lived experiences.  To say that you know the feeling of sexual assault because you witnessed the effects it had on your cousin is to lie to yourself and your listeners.  You may have a more complete picture, however you cannot fully understand the impact unless you have lived it yourself.  Even then, everyone's individual experience is different for a number of different factors, including environmental, emotional, mental, physical, cultural, level of ability, etc.

So, although it pains me to have to paint on others, I have to speak my truth.  Please do not tell me that there is no such thing as an individual truth; that is just a misinterpretation of reality.  I am not above reproach, however I have had a long time to think critically about not only my views and opinions, but those of others as well.  I am confident that I do not have it all together.  To put it another way, I am confident that my points of view and perspectives are fickle and fluttering.  Nevertheless, I am tired of being (sometimes) slowly shoved into a box.

I recognize that the boxing is nothing new for minorities and many people who do not look like me or think like me.  I know that I am not the only one who gets filtered into a container that doesn't fit my way of life.  There are generations of groups of people who have spent lifetimes and even given their lives in attempts to break even one side of their societal box.  I believe that as this world continues to diversify, as it is only doing more and more, we will all have to increasingly learn how to make room for the unique, the abnormal, and the unfamiliar.  Most, if not all, people have had moments where they were assumed to think, act, or be a certain way based upon broad generalization.  This feeling can be hurtful, and I'll admit that sometimes I have often been the painter of these broad strokes.  However, I am asking that when the words I say, the comments that I make, or the jokes that I allow to fill the silence are interpreted as walls being built around who you are as fellow human being, please gracefully offer me correction.

I can be ignorant, I can be hurtful, and I can be insensitive.  However, if I am not taught in a manner that doesn't widen my wounds, I may never learn.  Meanwhile, I will try to remember that discipline is painful today, but the scars that it produces prevent deeper wounds in the future.  World, let's practice grace, mercy and forgiveness, all the while not forgetting to be open to teaching as well.  Love is in the air if you will just pollinate it in season.

"All the things I [did] say to you before you moved across the country"

"It's all possible, don't worry about me," the voice in my ear was a gentle whisper.  I saw signs in the distance, or was it the far end of the cavern in my head?  Was I seeing visions projected from my heart's paintbrush?  Was I just opening my eyes to the brilliance of the colors all around me?  I'm Forrest running after Jenny, but only in my mind.  Outside of these walls she's dashing away from me.  I want the unattainable, to grasp the unreachable.  I want to touch a heart that beats a different rhythm.  I've shown her the stairs but she has to take the elevator.  My feeble arms complementing her passionate, nearly careless and somehow so caring spirit.  My fumbled words and her rhyming couplets.

All the fire in my bones makes kindling of my insides.  These unrequited passions aim to fool me.  They tease me in the direction toward authenticity or at least joyfulness, but I know it can't be.  I know it's not "we."  There won't be regrets this time.  No, at least not the typical ones.  The words poured from within me before you flew away.  I'm a lost plane circling the sun and we don't need to make an emergency landing to refuel any time soon.  Though so many thoughts flood through who I currently am, I'm already feeling like more of an ellipsis.  So now you can fill in the dots with your own thoughts and visions of cloud-kissed rainbows.

Good night then.

Here comes summer

Everyone is political and love is not politics.  The picture I painted of you in my mind is more perfection than the poem that I can touch.  My heart invents fairytales to my head's dismay.  I fall asleep with the blinds closed and hope to wake up with sunlight peaking in.  It only takes a spark.

I don't want to be inside all of this evaporated guilt and a point and click universe.  I don't want to be live where forgetfulness is happiness.  Some days you wake up hungover but at least you know there was something to regret.  Here under my unmade sheets I lie awake, but only in consciousness.  My eyes are open but my feet don't function.  My heart beats but ever so slowly.  Every doodle I draw is someone else's.  Nothing really draws me but clouds whisk by me like the years in life.  I gaze at them with curiosity, take my eyes away for what feels like a minute, and they're gone.

I'm the shadowy figure of a balloon's reflection.  A colorful shadow, but a shadow nonetheless.  Whispered darkness carries me away and any hope of light is overcome by the distracting noise of dying flowers.

After the rain

The blue moon glow hides behind the the clouded ceiling.  Most of the street is blinded save for a cone of wet asphalt flickering in and out of the forward leaning streetlight.  My window is soaked in condensation and leftover rain drops from the storm only a few hours before.  Inside the air runs consistent, but the second floor struggles to find a cool enough temperature.  At least the thick muggy air is locked outside.  Toads croak in the bushes, sharing little tidbits about where the mosquitoes and lizards are hiding to each other.

My head presses against the glass but only mentally.  In actuality I sit with a gaze through more than just the window pane.  My thoughts and vision pierce through the soaked pavement and into my own illusionary present future.  I see joyfulness far away and contentment in the distance, though the latter is attached to a string that starts inside my chest.  I see love tied up on a branch too high for me to reach on my own.  Imagined futures flood into my present.

Then I reinterpret the past and come to a new line that's supposed to be rusty.  Like misremembering the which subway you took home two nights ago.  My conscious lies awake and pushes me to dream through reality.  Anything we can conjure up or find to distract us will serve us much better than this alleged patient love, it tries to convince me.  You're asleep anyway, what's the use in pushing the dreams away?

Still, I know that love is patient.  I won't be swayed so easily.  I may fall asleep with my guard down but every morning I wake up with renewed skin.  The muscles surrounding my heart grip me tight and loose.  My lungs fill with breath and fluid.  I'm not drowning but walking toward the sun with shades.  I'm a daffodil leaning outward, following the Light.  My roots are learning to tangle themselves in the solid ground around me.  I'm trying desperately to try.  It's interdependence and inward acceptance and motivation.  Step by step.  Day by day.  People don't grow in one day.  Stems aren't always green.

Three in one

I heard our song on the radio tonight.  Or rather it was the song that never became ours.  The one we would've sang into the wind with the windows down and the volume up.  We used to hold hands to keep me from falling apart by myself.  Remember the night we walked down the train tracks and got caught by the security guard as we lay on the tracks?  I used to reach for your hand so I wouldn't have to feel the wind pass me by.  Now you're thousands of miles away and the only thing between my fingers is the moisture from the thick gulf stream air.

I still hear your voice at the far end of the dimly lit tunnels.  I still reach for your hand while I'm driving and my heart stops.  Why couldn't I tell you when you were in my arms?  Why couldn't I hold you when our arms were tangled vines?  Now we're friends and nothing more though my heart's arms are sore from trying so desperately to reach beyond the shore.  You've wandered off to recollect your native tongue, but we used to speak in Romance languages.

As you walked away I could never say anything that would keep you close.  You saw an image of me that I thought I was.  You saw what I thought I wanted to be.  I'm still becoming myself, aren't we all?  You saw the ripples of a man still dripping holy water.  You saw a preteen in a young man's body.  So maybe now I'm just going through different motions.  Yes, perhaps now these are just my teenage lusts that I'm grasping after like vaporous dreams.  It could be that these memories are just that, memories and not a preliminary chapters to my love story.  Maybe.  Maybe I'm just wasting both of our time.

I'm Still Here

Faith is not stutter steps.  It's the opposite, or so I would posit.  It's jumping across the creek without seeing the other side.  It's not hearing the whisper but know that it's inside.

You are just, I know that. Anything that I could think to put forth from my mouth out of my mind is slivers of splinters in a crooked sculpture.  We try to correct our systems but neglect to remember that they are birthed out of broken tools.  Our lives are invisible whispers in the breeze on an Autumn evening.  Here today and gone tomorrow.  We welcome each other and attempt to hold the other's brisk wind in our palms but it always slips our grasp.

We fall asleep one day and wake up with gray hairs tickling our ears.  We wake up one morning and the birds have flown.  We open our eyes and our lovers have left with less than a sticky note.  Stale fragrances of cheap perfume and bloated livers in full bloom.  We wake up and the casket that we buried years before calls to us.

No one will believe me, we tell ourselves and we thank the soul that swept away for purchasing the darker shade of blinds.  Our eyes slip back inside ourselves, hoping we can hide ourselves.  Another morning like this and they'll need to turn me over.  Or perhaps another week like this and it won't be the burden I'm bearing, just a pole that the only ones left are sharing.  It was years ago we made that pact and though our words barely skim passed common pleasantries the agreement is sealed in stale blood that will soon be leaking.

Will you see me in the condensation on the window?  Will you remember me where the shadows used to fall on our bedside table?  Will you reach for your blanket, the one with the blue and white stripes that you used to cling to when the wind grew claws?  How will I see you?  How will I see?  Will I see?

If instead of now my face disappeared two years before, what windows would I have not been privileged to peek through?  Pop culture slang and celebrities reaching farther to extend the daylight like we all do.  More teams winning, some for the first time and others breaking barriers.  The Courts courted the people with new acceptance instead of old grievances.  Politicians paid for power.  The populace believed what it wanted or put on their dilated glasses.  The judges fell asleep long enough to let the thieves get away.

The sun came up.  The sun went down.  The moon circled the circling Earth.  The dead stars danced and the ant-like people let the illusion of their light guide the dark country nights.  Field mice ate seeds and were taken by winged thieves without sight.  The world awoke and sleep with one eye closed.

The world continued to spin.  Go to sleep little child, the world's a dark speck spinning without our force.