Things I would like to hear you say

Hello
I love you
I see the sunlight that slants through the trees and turns your eyes gold.
That dress hugs your shoulders and pulls my eyes towards your collarbones
I love the sarong you got me, I use it all the time.
I know that when you ask "are you alright?" you mean "I love you"
Talking to you is like coming home
I find myself in the twists and turns of your voice just so that I can lose myself again.
Kissing you is fireworks and starlight and moonshine brandy.
Touching you is running my fingers across my keyboard and seeing words dance across my screen. I'll never be able to explain it but I know it better than my own skin.
I would dance with you on the ashes of the dead world and where our feet touched the ground, golden rod would spring out of rich earth.
You're my walls, you're my roof, your my ground.
The fire inside you is beautiful. It's never too bright
It keeps me warm and the night is never too dark or scary when you're burning.
You're never too loud. I relish the thunder and the crickets and pounding bass and everything in between.
I want to be closer to you than simple physics will allow. I want to feel every beat of your heart and know it like music.
I want to sing along for as long as I can.
And when I stop following your melody, I will always have the harmony we made.

Found Poetry

All you want is the world

So take it

Take it in your delicate fingertips

Take it in grasping handfuls and hungry bites

Remember your ancestors took this world unfairly

Remember your ancestors being forced off their own land

You are unique

Look around the world

Want the world

And seize it

And give it freely

Give it in the name of your ancestors who took unfairly

Give it in the name of your ancestors who were taken from

Give it to all the people of the world

All your people

Your people saved and wild

I'd like to fuck you in the dark

For a long time,
I only wanted to fuck you with the light on.
I like to look at your face,
Your eyes, your arms.
I am in love with the way you bite your lip when trying not to call out.
I am in love with the freckles starring constellations across your shoulders.

A few weeks ago, you asked to fuck me in the dark.
You told me you like to feel me.
At the time I didn't understand what you meant.

But tonight
Tonight I lead a dozen school children in a night hike
Tonight every detail of every tree popped out at me.
Tonight the stars of the milky way were pinpoints of sensation across my skin
And I think I understood
Why you'd like to fuck in the dark.

Today it rained

New York city is concrete and granite. Basalt  and sidewalk. Sometimes the rain falls and it doesn't know where to go. There is no comforting green to welcome it home but hard pavement and unrepentant, undulating car tires.
The water panics. It can't go anywhere. It rushes the water treatment plant in howling whirlpools and frantic waves. It flings itsself into New York Bay and brings the filth of the city with it.

My duffle bag!

My duffle bag is ripping
Orange fabric straining to hold together
White cotton poking through the seams.

The bottom of my duffle bag was once a bright orange to match the sides.
And now the bottom is the brown of the dirt on the roadside

How do I describe the particular joy in burning out?
Kind of like how in hitch hikers guide to the galaxy they describe flying as "falling and missing"
I can't decide whether the feeling in my stomach is excitement or dread.
The reason they call it burning out is that the flame is so bright.
And you hope that maybe the burns will be superficial.
That the light is worth the pain.
Because you know you can't tear your eyes off the flame.

And my duffle bag is falling apart and I am falling and missing and one of these days something will hit the ground.

Another New York City Poem

It's hard to write in metaphors when you live in New York city.
Today I saw a homeless man's penis. It was shocking and horrifying and I felt anger and anxiety and pity and I don't know a how to wrap that expierience neatly in a metaphor and tie up the lose ends in a bow.
The subway systems are maybe a metaphor. Vital and important and dying and screeching.
I got harassed by a man on a nearly empty subway. He waved his hand in my face and as I stared straight ahead he called me a bitch. Homeless men and women wandering endlessly through the cars. Hoping for money.
Or maybe there's metaphor in a street fair. The block closed off and the smells of food and bright colors of clothes and the overlapping chatter and the tight, hot press of bodies.
New York city's packed street with the passenger cars and taxis and bikes and pedestrians.
Prospect park with dogs off leash and big, green lawns and homeless people sleeping in the tunnels and hidden kayak rentals.
This would be a terrible poem.
There's no theme. There's no rhythm. Just a jagged, throbbing life. A heart blood being forced through the streets and the tunnels and the tragedy and the joy.
Too fast to understand and too slow to even notice.
It's hard to write in metaphors when you live in New York city.

Subway poem 15: Bound for Manhatta

Bound for Manhatta on the morning train
Sweating in the obtuse humidity
To return to a land I'm not sure is worthy.
But still the tide must rise on the hudson.
Tonight it will fall again:
The river that flows two ways.