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.
When freckled light blooms from city streets
We cling to one another
I cannot separate your exhalation
From the delicate air I breathe.
I wrote you a letter with the first breath I took
I’ve written you every moment since
Your name has steadfast sat on the tip of my tongue
But darling, while for so long words escaped
Your half-moon heart I know so well
For my star shines from the other side
Celestial marvels apart
But oh sweet love,
Together we are full
I took my patiently longing letters and sent them
Beseeching each stranger, stop light and song to be my postmen
I prayed that the conversations between our searching souls could rise to paint the sky–so that the stars might mirror your freckles, the moonlight the glow in my eyes
Our perfect haze of what will be
Heaven drew maps on our palms
So that each time we sat with our head in our hands
We could trace the paths worn into our calloused skin
To see how much closer we’d come
To sharing no more paper words
Besides the Times between us
On sleepy Sundays
I didn’t know my map was torn in two
That when the path seemed most to come to a solemn stop
You would reach out to shake my atlas palms, my compass heart
Repeat words I’d say for decades to come after long days
Hello, my love. It’s so good to be home.
We have our own language, you and I
When the two of us talk with our hands
I read the braille of your goose bumps
My fingertips sing to your sideways smile
As my skin memorizes moments
That age will one day forget into silken shadow
Take my hand and we’ll walk
Tell me your mother’s favorite flower and your father’s favorite book
I’d like to know how many widths of my pinky finger
Fit in the spaces of your spine
The capacity of your lungs when full
And the moments that make you breathe that deeply
Grand views or the Old Italian woman’s laughter making the inbound bus fly
Is there a way to quantify exactly how much envy the Milky Way pours into your irises?
You wear fear patched on your sleeve and you’ve stitched it so tight
It will require a lot of adventures, storms, stories, sun and stumbles for it to fray
But that cocktail is by large my favorite sandpaper
I will wear a ferocious brand of domesticity
I will care so hard it blisters my soul; knowing full well callouses make it hard to call me “pretty”
The first time I saw you
I swear in the indelible elegance of our irises igniting
I didn’t fall in love–love fell through me
I want to wear that love on so much more than my ring finger
Tattoo your sunsets on my rib cage
So that I can jump-start dawn with each beat of my heart
I want to wear your love on my pinkies
So you can laugh at feigned propriety when I sip wine at the bistro downtown
Don’t be my umbrella
Be the forgetfulness and the whisper in my ear when it rains
Teaching trust that the sun will come
Be the sun when it comes
I want to wear your love in my laughter.
When I taste those iridescent words,
I mean that I want to promise you poetry and tree bark and starry skies and nights asleep in our little home
When I say I love you, I mean that I promise…
I promise to spend every moment of the rest of my life loving you
And when those moments float away like firefly embers into the night
I promise to take your hand and step into entropy
To choose one of those evanescent pinpricks and learn to exist as light
I promise to never give up
To never grow complacent
To spend every day learning how to love you even better
Because of that
I promise to love you courageously
I want to love you in a world of little things
Bottles of wine on Tuesdays
Breakfast in bed
Mountain drives
And kisses you never saw coming
I promise to always be kind to you
I will not call you anything that is not love
I will not let anger run in my veins
I will be honest
I will be soft
I promise to set butterflies free in my chest each time you walk through the door after work
To hold your hand when you’re scared and your heart when it’s heavy
Let these words be a promise—not because there will be moments where we can’t remember
But because I want you to be able to hold in your hands the overflow of joy we pour into one another’s worlds.
The answer we both hold locked in our hearts. The truth that must never be uttered until perhaps that day, when we meet in a coffee shop along some drawling avenue in some drizzly city.
I never quite could grasp it.
How the shimmering sheen of your gaze
Could enrapture me
Swiftly, purely
Entwine me in unfaltering arms I’m yet to hold.
Thickets of thorn, baby’s breath
Unraveling
Slivering, shimmering, silken threads
Threads to follow
To twist round your pinkies
In delicate bows
Moments of satiated solitude,
Forget me not love
Forget me not.
Lights return me
To hazy meadows
Of golden shine
Of simpler time
A twist of daisies
A square of sunlight across a quiet bench
Resting, waiting,
All to resume
Your palms pressed on mine
The melody of moment.
Did you hear the echoes of days passed by?
A solemn stillness in our eyes.
Your life may be a melody I’ve never heard but its notes are etched in my skin.
Please put your hands around my humanity
Hold me in the soft warmth of your palms,
Don’t let out my light
Call me your baby
Call me your darling, your dear, your love of your life
Call me whatever you’d like
But please,
Call me.
Sit with me in summer meadows
I’d like to dream with you, my dear.
Let lilac air kiss your skin
Willow breath will brush the braille of goosebumps,
Preserve each word in boughs of golden green
Stay close to me,
The embrace of mountains will keep us warm tonight.
Darling, I’d like to grasp the galaxies in my palm for you
Fill my wholeness with sweet orchard air
Allow my exhalation to scatter the starlight into your dark nights
This map you gave me before we were
Always most true when I wish it were not
The mountains and forests and train tracks I’ve crossed
We are both here,
Together, wherever, whatever lies between.
I am shadowing berceuses through lawless meadows
To see if you are the one whispering this shanty soliloquy
Your song is the only echo to each beat of my heart
Louder, love.
Tonight the moon is a chair
I’d like to step softly to a staircase of starlight
Sink slowly into slippered silence
Wind my way through the hush of nighttime breezes, their fingers dancing in my hair.
I would like to summit the sky
To curl into the curve of this crescent moon and count constellations
So far from familiar and somehow still so at home,
My head on your chest serving as gravity enough to hold me here always.
Will you meet me there?