the night we met you asked me to write a poem for you
your eyes were glowing exit signs when you told me your childhood was your father’s fist through white wall-
was watching your mother paste colostomy bags to her cancer cut husk was unjust
your childhood was a promise that god did not keep.
now you deserve a poem like summer nights deserve cricket symphonies
you deserve the sky to crack and rain down apologies like butterflies.
your razor scars look like lines in my journal and i never want to write again
until these words wield over your wrists.
you are a lit match tumbling toward the gasoline pooled in my stomach
when you slash your skin i’m stabbed, split, helpless-
i can not let this be.
you do not think that you are beautiful.
a plague of flute notes spool through my throat,
those knifes, like thoughts, surge through your crown
and one day you will stop taking them by the blade.
a blue stone strength swells at your center
and you will know beautiful.
the strange engines of seeing churn in you…
and i can pour song from the thick nimbus i’ve been lost in
since your breath stuck into my skull
and i will tell you the exact co-ordinates on your back where i
lost my mind.
but you will learn to love the soft coastline of where your freckles island-
without me, without anyone else.
still- my eardrums rapture, your laughter,
when you call me silly or when i tickle just above your kneecaps
until salt, silt, and breeze lace your cheeks
quenching something deep.
this poem is you softening moments from sleep,
sinking beneath an ocean of scars and into open arms.
there is no mirror with mouth enough for the burst stretched sigh of a tired hell of your body.
and if my tongue is more than a ballast in my skull
it was meant to trace the valley:
where your hips dive to meet your waist
to translate the space
the curve,
the yearning,
the taste of god,
the pain that carved those love handles,
and the love that they hold.
you dance and you laugh when i try to, so dance like this is your poem.
like the hymns in your veins have caught fire and cherubs are ripping out your hair,
dance like a velvet goldmine exploding
know your breath.
a white rose risen through rubble of gums, and ash of tongue that throws petals in the wind to drift alone.
this is my small offering.
a conjunction of your lip prints blossoming from my cheekbone.
this is your poem.
…and your eyes are two harvest moons in the arms of a forest
just so you know…
there is a timorous water that longs to hug your ankle bones.
and one day you will dance through the puddles of heaven,
the echo,
welcome home.
