I’ve always been better at writing than speaking. I find the silent confidence the written word is capable of more beautiful than anything. There is something ironically meek to me about speaking. Speaking is rarely done alone and its constant inflation from other people’s responses tend to distort the true meaning of the original words being spoken. Silence is pure- being untouched by other biases allows the validity of it to always be certain. Unlike the spoken word, the written one alone is found in this surety of truth.

I remember her red dress, of how when night came it’s thin straps slipped over her thinner shoulders falling slowly into a wrinkled circle on my floor. I remember her seeing me seeing her put it on in front of our ice curtained window the next morning and even though that dress was too short for autumn she would wear it anyway. I think because she knew it drove me crazy. She would hide it underneath her long winter sweater like she was keeping safe a secret that was only just for me. When she put on that sweater the light from the dawn would sneak out through the tiny holes in the fabric kissing sun-ray freckles on her pale unmarked body. She pulled it over her head ever so slowly. The leisurely motion in some way made me image a 9 year old boy I who for the first time that winter hesitated to pull but his snow boots over thickly crocheted socks.  His feet look like her head in some way. Both are somewhat unwilling to slide into warmer weather clothes; hiding a secret warming joy.

How smart we were to eat pieces of one another
To keep small portions of each other
Hidden cleverly inside us
The little bits of you secretly tickling
The inside of my stomach
They don’t feel like butterflies
More like birds of prey
Dancing with angels
Their wings brushing up against me
When the joy of their movements
Allow them to forget themselves
And spread their wings full.

You said you keep the best secrets.
No one keeps secrets as well as you.
They are never as safe as they are when whispered
Into your ears to hold.
In that moment all I wanted to be was a secret.
A quiet whisper entering your ears to stay.

I love you in ways
That the word love cannot fully carry
In ways that that word could never hold
Without buckling over from the weight.
Sometimes I think it’s because there are not
Enough letters in the word love
And all that I feel for you cannot balance
On a number as small as four.
Sometimes I worry they will loose their footing
Way up there on love, too big for only four foot holes
And they will fall down to earth
But I love you in ways that don’t make me afraid
To blow away the crumbs,
Dirt,
Pieces of dust bunnies,
That cover the thing that is more than love
That I have for you
I will rub it on my heart
And keep it there clean
Until I find a bigger word than love
To fit between I and you.

What if when the dust finally settles
And the tides have stopped
Crashing against the shore
And the winds sit still on tree tops
All that remains of you are your hands
Riddled with scars from words
You have written for me
And I am gone.
You sit there for the rest of time
Staring at constellations of scars
On your skin that spells out all of the
Things you wrote about me
And over the ages my face will blur to you
My hair will stop looking to you
Like wheat fields and slowly it
Will look more like a sonnet
My eyes you will remember to be blue
But they will look to you like the third
Ripple of ocean water from a stone
What if when the dust finally settles
You ended up changing your mind
And all that remains of you are your hands
Still scared but you can’t tell
Not when my hands are covering them up.

Love is a terrible thing.
A horrid and invisible thing.
The one thing that defies the human
Fear of the unknown
Oh but we want to know it.
We want to see it to hold it
So badly that over the millions of years
Of both our and its existence
We have died for it, killed for it
Begged and sobbed on our hands and knees for it
This invisible force of good feelings and warmth
That we think circles tangibly around us-
Swims and ebbs around our fellow man
Connecting us all and touching the lucky ones
But it isn’t enough.
We want to see it.
We want love to take a form we can mimic
And hold forever
So over the years we have thrown things at it.
Hoping love could somehow catch it
Be consumed by it, covered in it
Its illusive form reveled to us finally
With our clever trick
Writers douse it with ink
Artists with paint
Bakers with flour
Churches with gospels and white ropes
And smartest of all
Teenagers, who throw at it their own bodies
Hoping to trap it somewhere
Between both of their naked beings
Those teenagers  who don’t have anything else to offer it yet
Nothing to throw at it
Nothing to lose in it yet
Still thinking love isn’t a terrible thing.