Daisy dreams in the wide palmed plains
Bright-eyed lullabies
Drenched in some orphaned sun
Find me waiting for you
Holding my heart across my chest
Beating
Beating
When you try to count ravens
But forget how many mean life, luck, or loss
Sunlight splinters draw lines on their land
Fragments full of the only solitude you've ever held hope in
Still I believe.
As the headlights first dawn across your cheek bones
Scalding sun on a reaching horizon
You'll understand stillness is a question
From somewhere behind yourself you'll watch your body become someplace able to be broken
Spiderwebs will bloom through glass, meandering tributaries unwinding to some sea you don't know your toes will ever touch
That single breath suspended
In the sacred space between open lips and clenched fists
Fragility and the tabernacle you’ve held it within
Will ignite in place of the sound your lungs hoped to make
Little white sighs of expectation etching their songs into silence
As the trembling begins to crawl into your coiled bones
You’ll touch places you thought you’d never mistake
Some sweet dust of faith brightly blurring words left unsaid
The gentleness of unfelt cacophony
And the carillon of ringing in your ears
Bells never sounded so sweet.
I want to buy you a cup of coffee on your best and worst days, write you notes and leave them scattered around your house, show up on your porch in the pouring rain with my ukulele just to say hello, send you postcards brimming with adventures and run away with you for weekends with no maps. I want to love you in a litany of little things.
I love mornings best, I think. I love the coffee sips and the precocious weight of an empty day.
I think I’ve been afraid to write
Because if I opened the door the tiniest shutter
This heartache might just spill out in a kaleidoscope of paper memories
Stamped with your name
Three letters I wish spelled something simpler
I-O-U
Do you know why, the leaves tip-toeing across the sidewalk square know your name?
I’ll tell you now, you’ve never met.
I think that they heard
I think that they heard,
When I politely asked the world to stop spinning.
Just so for a moment
We could turn ourselves back around
Grasp our hands together
Look up and tell the stars, “I’m ready.”
The leaves know your name because the trees speak silence in the same language as us.
I don’t know how to ask you
If you are afraid, that when the world starts spinning again…
We may just float away?
I won’t let you float away.
I will dig my heels into the soil beneath our souls
I will tie the big dipper around my waist and anchor it to the trunks of the trees
I will tell gravity to stop panicking and just let go
Gather the constellations and planets
On the tail end of an inhalation
Allow the breadth of the galaxies to rise with the lungs of a sleeping dreamer's chest,
Just breathe.
I will send you these words until the day I die
Then I will paint them in the sky.
I paused mid-kiss
To look you in the eyes
You asked me what,
But you knew what.
You knew that somewhere…
A star had imploded
Mountains had moved
A first breath had been taken
The earth had shaken
A tree had fallen and made no sound
Birds had sung hymns
The wind had blown whispers of wildflowers
Soft as your fingertips tracing my arm
You knew
That somewhere in the infinity of your irises
Implausibly intricate
Strands of dawn-dewy webs
Were being woven
Between your soul and mine
But all you could manage was
“What?”
And all I could do was smile.
As I am running away from you it is as if the words you’ve stifled explode into sparks
I try to catch them in my fingers
They burn
Sweet heat and escape.
I know your rough palms
Only by the breadcrumbs you scatter for sparrows on sidewalk squares
The chattering of little birds
The best reminder of avian-toed patterns that etched themselves into the corners of her perfect eyes
When you hummed her words that could best be rendered
By a handful of scattered grains,
Learning to sing.
Is it ever the indigo hours, when you so desperately desire to put on a pot of coffee?
Maybe the morning would come sooner,
If it only had the invitation.
We have a lot of hiding places,
A lot of secrets speckling the backs of our hands.
My sunshine calls them freckles,
I just call them you.
Did you know
When your heart felt filled
That it could be full?
You ask how I know…
I know because I knew,
And here you are.
I’ve caught so many snowflakes on my tongue walking home
A galaxy of lucky stars would hold a thimble of this love
My eyelashes are dream catchers tonight
You darling, the dream.
When night light filled my tired eyes
The moon was not who shone
My luna,
Her sweet celestial subtlety
Only a kindhearted dove to carry here
Such impossible incandescence
As richly poured from distant warmth
The kin of humble heaven’s sparkle
I so often wished upon
In the indelible elegance of pastel dawn,
Too bright to meet my longing gaze
Let me live in eclipse forevermore
For all along,
Nursery rhyme yearnings for hopeful home
Were withered upon gauche glimmers
Feigning grace
You, my sweet love
You,
Were my dusk-cloaked star.
I wish our years were wooden
That I could set each morning coffee ring
Within tomorrow’s
Until I could wrap my arms around the trunk
Of a great, breathing red oak tree
I would let our laughter live as leaves
Our hope hang down on molasses vines
Etch our fears into hollow roots
Days become memories
Cradled concentrically
We could sprint through our growing lives
Forest sprites drunk on sunshine air
We should never know how old we were
Bark shading soft secrets,
These woods would remain
Long after we’d gone.
When you lose your voice
To the sea salt drying in your hair
Turn your palms towards pastel haze
Exhale longing for words that won’t come
Your song found itself somewhere
Between lost and in-between
Echoes that never sound quite the same
As words tumbled from beeswax lips
Funny how the fractures
You fought with might and malice
Grow now soft as tangled roots
Beneath sea salt tracks down petal cheeks
Sit here and cradle your caution
Sing, little meadow flower
Hold the soil of courage
The trickle of star-shine in your veins
Where sleepy Sundays collect in the eaves
Celebrate silence with me in azure light.
That light traveled thousands of years to meet me
I whispered to your sleeping self
Your breath replied in metered sensibility
In time with your sea-bound heart
I’d like to be a harvest light
The moon in the moonshine
I’ll be the moon
Who shines for you.
By the song of satin plains
Pinking in the Westward sky
My rose-colored windows
Face the same sky as you
Believe me when I say
And take trust as truth
Home is just where we’re headed
And right where we are
I want the crook of your spine
Like the bend of the oak
Over lilies and lampposts
Who can't outshine your stars
Bare feet on silvered pine
Sing me through your shadow
Cradle light in cupped palms
Knowing this one is for you.