hold your breath and pull it from your stomach
the dark is the safest place to touch my hand
so let's just watch that silver strand come up
silent and sure in its way
slipping past sharp lungs
drenched lungs, crystals floating on the surface
the salt from a father's sweat and a mother's tears
grown quickly thick from wordless fears
they thought we couldn't hear
"these are not children of the night"
they whispered, certain
but we're not children
we're stars that don't know how to implode
but we'd better find out because i know
the dark is the safest place to touch my hand
so if we keep on shining like the floorboards don't feel it
i won't know how to face us anymore

hold your breath and pull it from your stomach
through your mouth, out like a circus clown
glowing faint like the street lamps of your hometown
blood and ink and bathroom sinks don't matter
when they're knit in a scarf of impermanence
wrapped around some lopsided snowman
knocked off and away by the neighborhood dog
and soon forgotten
lost in a flurry of teacups and time
and floor-scattered tissues

hold your breath and pull it from your stomach
i'll wait to make sure you breathe again
and in the silence
we can play cat's cradle

i've been all over the world
you've been all over the country
but i think you're more worldly than me.
you asked me
of all the places i've been
where i'd like to go back to
and i thought of the answer
but could not speak so my eyes
spoke for me
spilling over salted memories
turned red with a thousand sunsets long past
and largely forgotten.
cried over
slept through
driven under
kiss strewn.
and you said speak
i'd thought it already
so it couldn't hurt me anymore.
your patience is much greater than you say
and your kindness is much less estranged than you wonder
because you waited until i looked up
tears on cheeks like rain on windows
a mark on my forehead from where it rested
against your wrinkled sweatshirt
mascara dust smudged across sticky lashes
bleeding as i whispered
(i want to go home)
(but you did go home) you said
(yes, i did) i agreed.
(and it wasn't a good time?)
(no it wasn't)
(but you want to go home?)
(yes i do. i had a home and now it's gone)
but you said you'd never had a home before
then you held up our hands and said
maybe this was home
you said
maybe we're living in houses
built out of each other.

my mind is cluttered in the way
my room was cluttered at home
in the upstairs drafty guest room
of my family's house,
small and bright in morning and memory
big and dark in night and dreamings;
***** laundry that once lay strewn
over futon and desk
(or flowed over from rifled-through drawers
or across the floor, banished there in a fit of frustration
when looking for some lost found thing)
now lies over sticky dark brain parts
covering, protecting, cluttering;
the moldy cups of tea that once lined windowsill and dresser top
now lounge sideways, tipped and wet
spilling remnants of calm that have since grown sour
across a cognitive carpet that soaks them up, thirsty;
pens and paper, pastels and watercolor,
charcoal and graphite and brushes and shavings
sketchbooks and journals with pages ripped out
crumpled and thrown towards the trash can in the corner
(whose rim has long been set ajar
by tissues and bandaids and cellar tape)
all these things now wait in new corners
(different corners
mind corners)
and scatter every drawer of thought,
a familiar symbol of disorganized beauty,
of the genius that whispered secretless secrets into gifted hope chests,
of the artist whose tears breathed rainbow ribbons
down innocent cheeks
in the dark.
my mind is cluttered
and it is full
of the same things that have always lived there
even though
i now live elsewhere
and have since learned to tie my shoes
without much thought.

i think once you've wondered about stars and pondered determinism
and sat in a lake in the dark and the calm
and listened to loon calls that echo like rolling thunder
and seen the reflection of the moon in the water
i think maybe then you stop caring so much
about mosquitoes on your leg
or stitches in your side
(if maybe not about missed calls
or skated-over questions)
i think once you learn that nothing is a contract
that no one exists for you
and you exist for no one
once you've heard a thousand voices
and still find that you remember theirs
i think then maybe you can feel that the weight
the particles of existence lay forever on your skin
is not a weight
but a nod from the abyss
a kiss from the universe, whispering
goodnight sweet impermanent softness
goodnight wingless butterfly beauties
goodnight precious pointless seekers of the seekless
goodnight limited
goodnight limitless
goodnight home
if luck were a thing of flesh and blood
how lucky you'd be
to have nothing expected of you
in this patchwork of nothingness sewn from a thread
that never took your insecurity
your fear, your love
that never took your anything into account
when it drew speckled stars across darkened water
and bounced echoing birdcalls
haphazardly against your eardrums

the pull of a bow on a string is just that–
a pull, and not a push.
pushed music can ring though your ears and tickle your mind,
can tease through expression or alter your spine
but pulled music can make you glow.

it's a sort of art that has long been forgotten by most,
the noticing of the way emotion glitters the air,
scattered particles drifting by, soft and slow
like stars, faint in their flickering glow,
fallen from passing thoughts and floating glances
from gestures and movements and crystalline fingers,
spun off from spoken words
that swirl like kaleidoscopes from parted lips,
brushed from questions and bedsheets,
or risen in quiet steam
from a memory that's been stirred like hot tea
with a wooden stick
or a silver spoon.

with a bow and a string, you can do something special–
you can catch a feeling-star.
you can summon a single speck to dance in your hand
and pull
and watch as a focused strand is drawn out from the mess,
watch as it curves and twists and spirals through the air,
your instrument the loom
from which your feeling-scarf is knit.

and it will wrap around you, warm and safe
it will seep inside you,
deep into the chasm, your empty chest
and whisper nothing but sweet impermanence,
nothing but i am here and
i am now and
i will will be gone in the blink of an eye but oh,
you love me, you love me, you love–

and it will hurt, much later
it will sting and it will burn
and everything you thought was true will go all backwards and bent,
but pain reminds us that we're alive, time is a crooked bow
and you'll know  it was worth it because trust me,
you'll glow.

were were all of us in love with the dark and closet doors
drawn to the feeling of close, of cold against warm
of drawn in, of quiet, of knees pulled up to chins
the world was too bright, too harsh for our eyes
and they never did find sunglasses to fit in the light
so we simply went out and bought our own
and wore them in the dark

and we go to parties every night
parties where silence is the music that plays
over out collective heartbeat drum set as it picks up pace
in empty rooms that carry sound
like a cast carries a broken arm–
gently, painfully, purposefully.
we go to parties where we sit
with our cheap sunglasses to protect our eyes
using darkness to shield us from darkness, and ties
that we know will have to be broken
so we just sit in the silence and listen

our bodies are canvases
for a thousand watercolor words left unsaid,
our knuckles are painted white and red,
our parties are places where the things in our heads
are proven to be real.
we are all of us in love with the dark and closet doors.

positivity feels like a drop of water in a desert
and i'm tired of calling you with nothing to say
because if the desert were an ocean, i'd be the curve of a wave
something forever shifting, steep then still, steep then still
constant, but not the same
(splash splash, ripple ripple
a storm and a tide shift and a push of an oar
but then i guess even shipwrecks have anchors)

it's something my math teacher taught me to think of in numbers
the idea of a shifting wave
a fundamental of calculus, easily measured by tangent lines and graph paper,
a protractor and a trusty dixon ticonderoga number 2
(the best pencil in the world, i've been told)

but textbooks, backpacks, and the smell of dry erase
never gave me any clue of how to deal with seasickness.

do you like that world?
do you sit at your desk staring at chemical equations
considering a list of things that dead white men did or didn't do
a pencil in one hand (dixon ticonderoga number 2)
a knife in the other,
blood and ink and a bathroom sink
spilled like oil on pavement across your mind
(thick and dark in a toxic puddle, bad for the earth
but if you look at it sideways, sometimes you see rainbows)

when you go to bed and your hands shake and your breath
shivers out of you like a ghost,
are you satisfied with your world of locker slams and ABCs
and choices that you're told are yours?

maybe you're the desert
maybe i'm your drop of water
i'm tired of calling you with nothing to say
because really i'd guess i have too many words
i'm an ocean, motion sick from my own fluctuating sea,
and i would never want for you to be like me,
you're beautiful with your mountains and rocks and sand
i just with i could make you understand
how ever part of you glows when you talk about music
or how free your voice sings when you talk to me
while you're aimlessly doodling masterpieces
on some stupid vocab sheet.