I am at your doorstep
flowers in my hands like foreign things,
I don’t know why I’ve got them but the air is
tight, my pulse loud,
and you answer, as if you hear its knocking.
You’re far away but if I tilt my head and squint, I think
I see you smile
and my heart rises

like the heat in summer
like the balloons that leave our hands when we are young

And then I wake

I would open the door and show you in,
Here are all my greatest weaknesses, I’d tell you,
right here in the foyer so mind your step.
The stress cracks in the stone are starting to show but the structure holds the same as it always has,
I assure you. Sometimes the wind sneaks in through the back window, to the left of all the things I’ve been through, and some days its refreshing but other times it’s the reason these doors don’t always hang right on their hinges. Please forgive me for the cobwebs by the stairs. It’s been a while since I’ve looked but now that you’ve arrived I’m realizing how long it’s been
since I last took care of them.

The basement is a wild place and I don’t suggest heading there, but if you must, please know that my heart takes up most of the space and that my thoughts are known to form all manner of shapes in the dark. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are ugly, but all of them are me.

How boring that would be,
a life without adversity

I wouldn’t trade the events of my life
for all the fantasies this reality has to offer

Like a strike to flint yields flame
it is our experiences that spark into creation
the people we come to be

If only we could lie within our own chests, looking up,
watching with distant eyes the shapes that drift there

I’d see the shape of a closed window and a light that won’t turn back on

I’d see the shape of a man with a child on his shoulders as they comb the beach in the throes of a storm

the shapes of anchored, restless boats that long for open water

a sunlit pier off which feet dangle and the drips of popsicles cascade into the sea,

and I’d see you

We would not need substances to reach the layers of ourselves that we are trying to touch,
if we hadn’t buried them so deep

If I listen to the sky it tells me that sometimes we fall in love the way the leaves change in autumn.
A gradual shift in color, then a drop, all at once, blanketing our black and white hearts in vivid hues of orange, yellow and red, until suddenly, the world feels completely different than we remember it. Everything in us becomes light enough that we are stirred by the faintest breeze as it passes,

And I love you, I have decided,
the way the leaves change in fall,
the way the trees shed shamelessly,
branches exposed, feelings dropped at their feet like rain