You need only move
so slightly
to keep the rhythm slamming
in my chest

Please tell the people you love that you love them.
Preferably while they are here
While you have warm bodies and lungs
to push air through them.

While you have the arms to pull them into your chest and say,
“there is nowhere I would rather be, than here with you.”

It’s the feeling from the passenger seat
when there’s nowhere you need to be.
The tangerine sky is bursting
from the fallen sun, and it’s summer.
Your arm hangs out the window,
hand scooping at the breeze
and it’s warm
even though the heat of the day is fading.
The growing chill slides up through the balmy air,
but the goosebumps on your legs
are from the music

As if distance and time were a lifeboat
off islands of memories that could be left behind,
to burn and sink into the depths
of the unwritten

Pour me the night sky in a glass
I want to drink the moon
and taste the scattered rings of Jupiter
where all the stardust is strewn

The red spice of Mars,
a drop of rum
like silk across my tongue

all melted over
shaved ice crystals
from Europa,

I’ll sip blue light from Neptune
and the shadows from Mercury,

There’s not a flavor I want to miss
within this cosmic sea

It’s important to be affected by things,
to feel them deep where it can be uncomfortable for them to get in.
It’s important
for the world to touch you.
And it’s no more important for it to make you happy
than it is to make you sad.
Because bearing the burden of blue in your chest
doesn’t mean you will always feel its weight.
Because being buoyed by golden thermals across a summer sky
doesn’t mean you will never again be draped in grey,
and when the red of you has cooled
to the slate dusk of despair,
it is never long before it warms, once more,
to the orange of sunrise

We forget, in these moments,
that moments are all these are.
That we exist in a transitional state,
floating always
between one moment, and the next.
And all of the colors that we move through
that are meant to move through us
only get stuck,
if we never let them in