How long is it since you’ve been moved?

In a way your legs can’t offer you

To a place you can only get to
through the touch of a warm hand
you’ve let in, uncertain,
only to find it fold
so carefully
around your heart

How long is it?
Since you were held,
without an ounce of selfishness in it
without the slightest notion
that you would ever be let go

It’s the same every time.

You’re sitting across from me in an abandoned food court or a movie theater or it doesn’t matter, and there is something so unnatural in the movement of your body that I can’t relax.

You ask how I am
and I don’t answer because I can’t look away from the thread of blood that has trickled
from the left corner of your lip.

You think I don’t notice,
you wipe it away and still try to tell me that you’re okay, that you’re Here
that everything’s going to be alright

and in the dream, I still don’t believe you

It can be hard to notice yourself
finding it more and more important
to look fine
than to be, fine

The stairwells of our minds are dark because there are no direct windows to let light in from the outside. Just winding hallways with the occasional waste basket that the groundskeeper has forgotten to empty.

When you’re inside yourself the only light you have to guide you is the light you make. Not everyone knows this, so there are some of us who wander these halls, looking for a window or anything that might resemble one. And they don’t know that they’re the electrician and the groundskeeper or that it’s up to them, to figure out how to feel ok again

If you only ever live along the surface of your mind,
you won’t see the undertow when it comes

when it sucks you under,
and drags you, deep
down into depths you never knew you had

I would fight this world with all I have  
to reach you

I’d dig my nails into the blue of my own sky
and rip from it
the light to lift you

I’d pull up the delicate threads
of time
and upend
this whole universe on its hinges,  
to rewrite your story

I’d tear the rings from Saturn,
from Jupiter
from Neptune,
to sew the cracks in your mind
with the sinew of star stuff

I’d drain the oceans,
the lakes
and the rivers,
to flush the anger
from where it clings like tar
along your soul
and leave you,
gasping and shivering and free

I’d smelt the iron walls
from around your heart
and forge you,
in the gold of the sun itself, anew

Just so I could turn to you
on my knees, and say
“I love you”

so you might look at me,
and say,
“I know”