Love Letters Never Sent.

If you need me, i'll be up with the birds.
There's not enough space to fly down here.
If you really need me, just say the word.
Simply whisper and you will be heard.
If you don't need me,
I have no reason to stay.
So, like a bird, i'll just fly away.
You are bigger than the sky,
and i'm small as a bird.
I'll listen for you always, whatever occurs.

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Dear Black.

Not every moment in our lives is important. It is not as if every moment should not be lived with lust, as it most often is, but rather, there are only some moments that count. You may be uncertain, like I, but I think you know this to be true. 

I change all the time. Every moment it is as if my cells are crashing into each other. They divide and then multiply to compose a different being; fluctuating and changing color in the light. I am infra red and hazy purple; sometimes I am blinding sky or the green in my fathers eyes. I have never been the translucent color of a moths wing or a sultry deep maroon, though I am often dark as black.

But Black, to me you are the best color of them all. You are night, the uncertain or the unknown, the space between my fingers just close enough to touch. Your color is the shade of an opportunity missed; because I was black and so was he. But even through the darkness I could see that his eyes were gold and amber hues and his smile the brightest of yellows.

Oh, Black. Oh, confused and frightened Black, I love you though you hurt me so. 

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Dear Dandelion.

Did anyone ever love you? A yellow weed in your life you slowly died your brilliant death. Did anyone stop to notice?

I ran so far today. Past where there was nothing left to where nothing ever could be. It was only there that I stopped. Not because my legs were buckling under strain or fatigue. Not because my breath came wheezing in and out of my lungs in rapid spurts like it had when my life began. I could have continued though my body was running on nothing more than desperation; sweat streaming like tears through my eyes. I run to force my heart to beat. Each beat an attempt to keep up with my rapidly accelerating body. All the while my body can't catch up with my mind. Today, my mind raced ahead and I stopped to stare at you. You are no more than a dead thing made of feathery bones and air. Staring at you, forgotten dandelion, at the intricate space between each one of your reaching tendrils, for a moment I forgot how to run. My mind simply stood still and I plucked you up from the ground. How could so many small things be so far apart but just close enough to touch. Like children at recess all standing around in a circle with nothing but fingertips touching. The magical whisper created with the tiniest touch of each fingertip barley brushing another. How all of these separate bits could come together to make a whole; an electric humming like my muscles and my blood and my bones pushing me forward through space?

I lie down on my back and hold you, this humming weed, to the sky. I spin your stem in circles through my fingertips to see if the bits of sky look different through different holes in this dead thing. I wonder, did death ever look so beautiful to anyone else?

With all my breath I released all your tiny pieces to the sky. They floated up and then took flight like birds set out of the darkness. They just kept floating up towards the light. 

And then you were gone. And I ran back through where nothing ever could be back to where there was nothing left. But I felt your humming on my skin and as I lifted my face toward the sky I knew that I would not blow away. Not today. 

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Dear Dreamer.

Expect wonders, even when they don't come. Expect wonders, and never fall asleep.

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Dear Sanity, 

I need to drink, have sex, and make poor and rash decisions without a moments notice. I must throw caution to the wind and live by the seat of my pants because that is what keeps me on my toes. It is in the mundane moments when I slow down enough to reflect on this great big thing, whatever it is, that we call life; that is when I get lost. For none of it makes any sense, not to me, and i'm not sure I can explain why or why not. But that is why I will keep drinking and having sex. I will make poor and rash decisions without a moments notice because that, my friend, is when I am alive and not thinking about what it is to be living. 

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Dear Young Lover, 

I watched you kiss him. I sat behind panes of glass across a leaf strewn street from you and felt your yearning for him aching beneath my own flesh. I thought I would breathe for you so that you could stay submerged that much longer in each others lust. Even I felt breathless. I watched you separate and felt the burden of what ever danced in the space between you. I wanted you to be closer. I felt an urgent need for your dangling hands to touch. Had your kiss seemed so desperate because it was deemed your last? Could I deem it the first of many lasts to come? I felt the coroner opening my chest as your young lover turned and walked away from you severing the bond I had seen. Every lengthening step between you and I could feel the coroner widening the opening in my chest with his instruments. Cause of death to be determined but most likely a broken heart. Your lover will not be able to retrace his steps back into your arms with the patterns of the leaves constantly changing. Like a tree sheds it's leaves your lover has left you behind. You hesitate on the step with one last hope that you might still be his, until, like the lingering leaves, you are simply swept away with the breeze. 

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How big is your heart? Do you know how much mass it consumes? When you look at a field do you see it in flowers, or in the number of blooms? Were you happy yesterday, and maybe the night before, but you woke up this morning and suddenly you are wanting more? More sunshine, more rain, more long lustful glances? More someone, less you, more room for second chances? Yet the moment you become who you wanted to be suddenly you find all you want is to be free. 

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When Autumn leaves do fall
fading orange images I do recall.
Old photographs like foreign dreams
had by strangers it does seem.
In times when red was all you knew
these days you dream in blue.
And when cruel sun hides away the light
leaving only vacant moon beams of dark night,
Ancient projectors with rusty reels
show forgotten children in Mamma's heels.
Little girls with big blue eyes
that danced over the world like spies
desperate to understand
why leaves change colors like dreams,
green, orange, red, and tinged with yellow at the seams.
When a strange southern pull steals the sun
and frigid winter in does run,
old photographs mean different things
when the girl you were wakes up without her wings.

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Dear Vodka,

Oh, how you burn. How you rip at my throat and make my body yearn. It is strange how I cringe at your touch but each passing moment makes me want you so much. You make me feel warm, smooth, un-rejected. But at the same time I am way too affected. And each time I drink you I forget who I am. I become who you want which is never the plan. You taste like I am dizzy and dancing and free. And while you just look better as the night it does lengthen, I look much worse in twilight darkened reflections. Yet I sip you and sip you like there is no hook; just the stars, just the sky, if you ever dared to look. You changed it all dear Vodka; just let me forget you. I only love you, my dear, for you don't make me think twice. 

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To Be is to Be Perfect.

Oh, to be the moment after the rain

saturated in stillness, 

in the thickness of space, 

like the wet that was soaking you

is finally drying off. 

You can be calm

you can lose all care

because in that moment, 

you are not you

radiating out

casting your shadow upon the world, 

but rather you are you

defined by the surrounding air. 

as if the constant of the thickness, 

of the stillness, 

is holding you in place. 

And you're not sure if you are breathing, or if you even should, 

because you could breathe in, 

and breath in, 

and never let it out. 

In this moment, 

to be is to be perfect, 

because everything looks, 

like it tastes, 

like is smells, 

like it feels.

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I could Meet my Husband Here.
I do not possess beauty,
though it surely possesses me,
that is what I shall meet my husband beneath a honeysuckle tree.
I surely shall not meet him
on a narrow sidewalk path,
for he would walk right past me then,
I cringe to say he hath.
But should I meet him in a wooded glenn
with twisted dreaming light,
he would surely have me then
for no other woman could ever look like the night.

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Dear Accelerator. 

It's either zero or sixty, and i'm running on empty. But I'm sure not staying here and there's sure no turning back. So, I'll push you to the floor and let the tires spin because, baby, these fumes are going to carry us away.

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I'm about to ruin your life. I am your car crash. I'm the traffic jam it has caused. I am the grief in your mother's tears pooled into puddles for your daughter to slip on. I'm your last sip of wine. I'm the grinds in your coffee cup. I'm the dirt in your cut you are trying to clean up. I hid the keys you cannot find. I support the addictions you'll never lose. I'll find your conscience and kill him too. I'm everything in time and nothing in space. I am disease diagnosed. I'm the name to go with the face. I'm the one who finished before you in every single race. I am a Hallelujah. Glory be thy name. Pray for me on your rosary but you're the one to blame. I'll cut out your eyes and boil them in a stew. You'll watch me savor every bite and there's nothing you can do. You look at me now with no sign of fear. Check you prescription for far and for near because this you don't want to miss. There is ugly without and ugly within. I will easily blind you with my soft spoken skin until you forget to ask me what I am doing. I will ruin your life but you'll be happy to know that I sold out the tickets to your very last show. 

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Dear Sparrow.

August third, little bird, shouldn't I be gone by now? I must have lost my charm by now; withered all infatuation away. I should have kept my distance, dear, but his smile made heaven oh, so near. And my heart I let it's  armor down to place it in his hands. I gave it up too easily and now this love is lost on me. Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye. Just please, leave me safely by myself. 

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Dear Fairytale Believer.

It's not just me. It's not just this silence that creeps up in the empty spaces of the noises to loud you cannot see. It's not the rain as it falls from the clouds, hitting the ground with nothing but the hope of returning back to the sky. 

"It's not me," he said, "It's you." As the last petal fell off the rose and the Beast remained a beast forever.

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Dear Reality.

You are my broken heart or the day before I start. You're a cocoon that blooms into a rainy day in June. And I have to remind myself that sometimes flying feels like falling, but, Reality, you are only what I make you. 

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Dear Chickadee. 

August thirds, little bird, and again you find me dreaming. I begged you to go, but when I awoke I found that you took my heart with you. Fear not, little bird; I am not mad to be lost in dreams. I would rather live in the sky. For when you're wings cut the air my heart skipped all it's beats. You took me so high that my shouts could only be muffled by the glare of the sun. And the sheer bliss of it all was the kiss on the wind and the promise abide that all my emotions could simply be tossed to the side because, Chickadee, they were really just along for the ride.

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Dear Mistaken Love, 

Your Touch is soft, like a delicate butterflies wings tearing apart her cocoon from the inside out. I feel the silk of my heart unravel. I mistook you, but I believe you took more from me. 

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Dear Aero Plane, 

A message to the cockpit:

I think of you the same way I think of flying. Except you were my destination and I never thought you would leave me there.

I did everything with the proper protocol. I stood in line and I checked all baggage to present myself to you so that you could let me on and strap me in. I felt secure in your control as your engines roared. 

It started out slowly with the anticipation of mounting speed as the increasing pressure of all the things you were pushing through started pushing back on me. I held fast to my position in my seat so that the contact of your tires smoothing hot cement could thunder through my body to land in my clenched fists. I wanted to disrupt some of your energy; to be not just a passenger but a part of your machine. 

But you go too fast and now i cling to my seat so as not to scream out for I feel you're every move. It hits me harder as i feel you push a little stronger and we are going so much faster than I ever though we would. 

I lose my grasp as the tiers moan as loud as the air that we disrupt or the screams that I supress. My senses re-engage and I feel I might explode into a thousand tiny pieces that not even you would be able to gather up and put back together. Then suddenly, we lose the ground and rise. We rise. We keep rising until we are up so high that even the coast of Texas looks like it is floating. 

Here, above the earth but below the clouds it would not matter if i lost all my scattered pieces for not even the biggest state holds any weight. Not when we are in the sky. But as we reach the clouds they push us down into a gradual decent until we hit the ground much harder than we left it. 

That, dear, is where you always leave me; and i feel much heavier here than whatever state we left behind. For, Darling, it seems that no matter where you take me I always find myself wishing i were back where i began. 

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Happiness is a bird. Sometimes she taunts me from the skies with trills of, "He loves you, he loves you not, " plucking petals from the flowers of my eyes until they fall like tears to water the thirsty ground. She darts around the branches of Oaks and Sycamores and changes colors with their leaves. She navigates my  horizon, and I am always running to catch up. Hopeful, I anticipate her around ever corner, behind every leaf, and in every boy's hand. I caught up to her one day, and to my wonder, I found her nesting on your shoulder as you sat perched in your tree. Did she rest there all along?

Suddenly, you were every tree Happiness ever darted behind. With one touch the bark of your skin felt soft, not course and weathered with the tears of twenty five years of rain. I swear, I saw every flower of spring burst into bloom within the pulpit of your eyes. It had a dizzying effect.

On that day it was you who gave Happiness to me. I trapped her within the cage of my ribs. Happiness beat her wings against my bones to get out but, selfishly, i wanted to keep her as my own.  Desperate, she fluttered around in my stomach. Careened up to my mouth to steal all of my words accept breathless. Then descended slowly back down to my chest to woo and entice all the air from my lungs. She brought a pounding to my head with the shrill tone of her laughter, all the while I was desperately running to simply catch up with my breath. Happiness did not belong there, locked up in my chest.

So, you painted my bird blue. With the delicacy of a course, home-spun fabric you wove your confusion through her feathers. And now you have shown her the way out through the cracks in my broken heart. Now, my Happiness has gone away from me. A melodic reminder floats down in rays of sunlight a faint, warbling promise of, "He loves you." But then the last petal falls from the flower and with a coy smile you taunt, "He loves you not," as I watch you and Happiness fly away from me forever. 

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We both have too many emotions. I bottle mine up until they distill into a subtly spiced blend. They never taste the same the second time around as they work their way from the outside back in. Who knows where it is that you hide away all your emotions. I feel that I could search into even the deepest woods in search of where your heart is, and when I am tangled in the brambles at your darkest part i will simply awake to find myself tangled in your hair. For some reason, you do want to keep me there, to have me always resting on your shoulder. I am a play thing for you when you get bored; a distraction of sorts for when the reality of your world becomes too stark. You may simply untangle me from your locks and allow my ever changing emotions to warm your face in an emanating glow. But while you keep me as your pet, you cannot predict where my emotions may flow. And somehow the river led me here; to some kind of love, though I am not sure what love means. You do, though, my sweet. You know the meaning of love. You could drink all mine up and still not feel it at all. Not today, nor yesterday, or in the many days to come. For all the places I have searched for your heart, you have been there, too. You cannot find it either. And I finally see, that of all the emotions we feel, we only share one. It is not love; it is lost. 

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Dear Evan.

I ran past the place where you were hit. It is not where you died. Instead, you bled out on the pavement while you waited for the ambulance to come. You watched through blurred eyes as the horror crept across the young EMT's face as he tried to stabilize you. He couldn't make eye contact with you as if you already weren't there. But you still were. You felt every bone in your body break over and over again with the turbulence of the helicopter as they attempted to airlift you to the hospital. They tried so hard to save your life because you really deserved to live it. 

Instead, I live mine. I attempt to fill the empty spaces with something that would mean anything. But I still find myself drawn to this empty place. Each time I go here as if I could say something to you, but you are never there. And I always have to just keep on moving past the place where the end of your life began. I cannot stop. Like I am trying to recreate the scene on the day you died. You were riding your bike with no thought of looking back. 

So when I hear a car approuching behind me I imagine it is just what you heard. Just what you might have heard any day of your life and thought nothing of it. But now I know better, and I wait for the impact. I wait for the car to hit me and smash me in half. With each prolonged step the car gets closer to me as my life drifts farther away. And you know what, I find that I can't decide if I want the car to crash into me or just pass me by. 

So, when the car screams past my ear and for a moment my heart stops, I imagine that I am dead. But then light reflects off the back bumper of the car that forgot to hit me. I am still here. And it makes sense, because this is not the place where you died; just where you should have if life was less cruel. I guess it is the same for me. 

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The day you met me my eyes were green. That is what you saw. You didn't see me the next night when I felt alone and dark shades of russet blue wove a web out from my dilated pupils.  You didn't see me after I ran for an hour and the sunlight sent streaks of yellow strain through my irises. You wouldn;t dare believe that some nights my eyes went so black that not one single star could shine through the depth of their darkness.  I began to tiptoe around myself, to only wear your green color when you came near. I liked the way I looked through your eyes, and then i realized; I didn't even know the color of yours. They could be black, or white, or ultra marine blue, but when they were fixed on me I never even thought to look at them. That is when all the colors I had stifled in my heart sprang back to my eyes and the words that leapt from my mouth told you I never loved you. And now, I fear your anger is bigger than your heart. Your heart smaller than the pain I caused. But my eyes are still the biggest of all. And you can't get them out of your mind. Because when you close your eyes to sleep, the eyes I never bothered to look at, mine are still all you see. They are big, and beautiful, and green. They are all you will ever remember about me; I think they are all you ever really saw. 

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Do you still have freckles in your eyes; or did they get wiped clean, too? When your father passed away was he afraid? Was it for himself or was he afraid for you, too? He splattered your eyes with the stains of the insults he spit at ou. Each blow he gave you was an attempt to knock the words out of your eyes so he smacked you around. You just saw shooting stars as every glimmer fell from your eyes. 

There were stains again when he blew himself away. This time it was blood and bone and brain splattered across the living room wall leaving you with no where to live in this dead place. I heard they scrubbed that wall for hours before finally painting it over in a cheery shade of green. 

There is a reason I came to your funeral today. I wanted to say something to you. The splattered stains scattered across the blues and greens in your eyes are the only trace of him I see left in you. That might have been what scared him the most; because even at his best he was nothing more than freckled stains in your eyes tarnishing your brilliant bright.

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I thought you saw me. Not just the curve of my spine or the dip in my neck where the collar bones meet. I never thought you were looking through me to the other side. And what did you see? Why did you make me believe my skin wanted your touch? Because now I need it and I know you don't want mine as much. It is crazy how I am convinced so easily of love. I need to hold onto myself, as I held onto you. I need to remember that nothing anyone says can ever be true. I can't even trust the smile on my own face, so why do I let you have me like you are taking first place? You make me feel worse than old, warm, white wine. I hate the taste of you, but you know I will drink you anyway because you're all I can find. 

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You always told me I wore my heart on my sleeve, as if that was a bad thing; and now I have his scar right where my heart should be. It really is awful looking seared onto my left wrist disrupting the delicate, pale skin on the inside of my arm. You always ran your fingers over the smooth skin in that place I kept my heart. You said you had to make sure my heart was still all yours since i kept it out in the open like that for anyone to steal. Now in its place is this awful scar; but more awful still is how i'm the one who put it there. I had to, though. The scar you gave me is packaged up nice inside my chest where no one can touch it. This scar on my wrist should be much more healed by now, but I guess it is just keeping time with my heart.

Instead of smooth skin, I now run my own fingers over the inflamed tissue of this scar like it is my own personal crystal ball. At first, I see a flock of birds sweeping a clear blue sky, but the longer I look and my eyes betray me as the delicate wings transform into a menacing scorpions claw. Other times, I will look and see just exactly what I had wanted to see; your dace as I wished it had been that day. I see your face, shocked I would be walking away, not the back of your head as you turned around and just let me go. 

When I am asked about how I got the scar I always lie. I say I burned myself using the oven or even more stupidly with some girly hair appliance. I could tell people that you did it, although, that is not entirely true. You didn't hold the flame to my skin. You didn't smell burning flesh as you watched my skin char. It wasn't you who left me with this secret to keep. But it was you who made my heart stop beating when you trapped it back inside my chest. That was only somewhere that you thought it belonged. But as the distance closed between the flame and my aching skin my heart finally started racing up to somewhere else where i could forget all about you. 

I hardly think of you anymore, except in brief fantasies when I imagine meeting you on the street. you tell me i look goo and reach for my sleeve to grab what you think is yours, but this is where i keep my scar now. You will ask me how i got it. That is when I will finally get to see that look of shock on your face. I will see it right before i turn and walk away. Horror will creep up on your smile and haunt any sparkle in your tear drop eyes as i tell you that i burned myself with the open flame of a lighter. How i sat there and watched the fire eat away at my pure, pale sleeve. I will not look back at you after i have turned away. I do not wish to see where it is that you are wearing your heart for me. I no longer want it; because now when I look at my scar i mostly just hate myself for ever loving you at all. 

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The fading of your light surprises me as it casts my shadow long across these surfaces of salted rock. They are so constantly carved away that they have forgotten how they began. I sit upon reflections awaiting the stars for now they have the burdening task of guiding me home. 

i count the hours since you have left in the crashing of waves. They rush up my legs and stain me with the salt of other people's skin that also let the water rise and ascend back upon itself without questioning or having any choice. The waves will always come and go much faster than the escaping light. No one has ever tried to change it. No one ever could. 

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