Quicksand
Hope is easy. It’s easy to look into the eyes of someone new, imagine a connection, project fantasies of understanding onto them, and build an imaginary future. Part of you knows it isn’t real but sometimes it seems it will work out. Of course, then comes the hard part. Because it’s one hundred times easier to keep believing in these fantasies than to stop, you find yourself stuck trying to find a way out.
Into the Dark
With the lights out and candles lite our two unsettled hearts rely on the end of a wick.
If I unfold like love letters, will you write back to me? There is something contagious about how your smile dances with your eyes but your heart, like my hands, trembles all day. You know I’m not to blame for all the bad but rationally, I know that I am responsible for some. Could we please just come to a compromise?
The wick burns down and so do you. I’m sorry I said I would follow you into the dark and I didn’t pull through.
Ice.
My heart is too big for my body and so I let it go. I’d hate to suffocate how you feel with the unfamiliar sound of my love when it hits the paper. But if I can crack ice with my voice I know I can get to you, my soul has squeezed it’s way through narrow spaces before.
Tequila, Tequila.
Take a swing, take a swing
we need a home run to win!
Tequila, Tequila
run those bases fast!
Then take another swing before
you chance has passed!
Tequila, Tequila
what did I say?
You got drunk too fast and can’t stay.
Tequila, Tequila
why did you play like that?
My liver is a windshield
and you are the baseball bat.
Mercy
The birds in my heart are rattling their cages. I am angry and easy to crumble. Sounds pretty foolish to act with anger, right? That’s what my older brother used to tell me when I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back begging him to yell mercy. He always warned me my behaviour would come back to me, but I was a child then and didn’t understand how much a broken arm hurt. Until it happened.
I should have said mercy.
I wrote you letters and stuck them to your door hoping that when you stepped in you would feel more at home. The ink lives in the wrinkles of my hands and my words are dissolving under the sea in your soul, they’re disappearing. You’re so oblivious it hurts.
Now your arms are twisted and tangled within themselves behind your back. You did this to yourself. Part of me wants to watch while you drown in the confusion you created and the better part of me wants to help you. How much longer until your bones break?
Just say mercy already. I won’t hold it against you, kid.
Whale Riders.
Sometimes we talk with fist fights in our voices. We pick at the scars and scabs so we can forget but when we wake in the morning the bruises that invert the colour of our skin teach us that love is all muscle memory, that all love breaks and reassembles so it can stand stronger. Between your thoughts and my freckles we are just sloppy muscle and our insides are dumb as bricks. As I swallow the concept I think about how much we need to grow, and so I took the first step.
I said sorry like it could change something, like it could cure us, like somehow it could suck us back up into a straw and take us to a time when raindrops splattered on windshields like it’s everything, like it wasn’t us. Our tears fall like Shakespearean confessions, beautifully doomed flowing down our faces in iambic pentameter.
This immensity we fall into from time to time is deep like the ocean but when we fall we rise and stand stronger. Soon our muscles will be strong and soon we will be the best bare foot whale riders the ocean has ever seen.
Drive
If I had the money I would fill your car with an infinite amount of gas and sit in the passenger side. I would let you drive me in the direction of glory and I would invite you to dance with me in this waltz of panic. The one we both feel.
Will I be successful? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Will I be understood?
You have to start telling the truth in order to get honest responses and that is something you are capable of because your words are so thick that knives could never cut through. I know you wouldn’t have the strength to stab backs so instead use those knives to cut the food that feeds the voice boxes of your family and friends, like somehow you are the answer. I know right now it feels like your words are a brush stroke in the dark but you shouldn’t forget that some people chew with their mouth open, that food will fall from them, and red light rain drops will evaporate over their heads and create a cloud of confusion.
This water cycle will sit on their shoulders like how my alarm clock sits on my bedside table to remind me that every day is one day less. One day less to understand. Don’t hold it against them they probably want to breathe in deeper than this because no matter how much rain falls, you are still golden. Those metaphors are so golden.
Is this for you or is this for me? I don’t think it will go over your head but if it does these words will grow hands, grab a hold of your ponytail and never let go. But now that I’ve said my piece, stop playing musical chairs with road signs and take me home.
Roses.
My heart rises to the attic of my throat and jumps from the window of my mouth, “I miss you too.”
I know how to walk through your bedroom with my eyes closed. I know how to make your skin sparkle in the night time. I know how to fill your veins with electricity under the duvet covers that keep our secrets. I know how to keep our bodies huddled together. I know how to make you love me.
We have become a routine.
I’ve noticed but you still haven’t learned how shelter your eyes from the sun. You’re blind. I learned that night how to hold my breath and let my phone go to voicemail when you called. I cut away my expectations when you skipped through the garden I was planted in.I didn’t realize how long you could pick these roses before your hands started to bleed from my thorns. You’re so beautiful someone could steal you.
I wonder if all the important things realize what they are.
