love me for being

someone who loves scrabble

someone who sleeps with her back near an open window in winter, breath rolling like a river into night

someone who wants to be waken up by love poems by e.e. cummings, and gives a small candle-flicker of a smile before opening her eyes

someone who appreciates the architecture of churches, but refuses to step inside

someone who has hands fit to hold wounded sparrows

someone who would tattoo that name onto her arm in the same color as her skin, so it would appear slowly as she suntanned, people thinking her blood was telling secrets to the world of its own accord

someone who learned Spanish to read  Neruda

someone whose hips whisper their own stories of the serpent and the garden of Eden

someone who playfully bites the back of their neck, or like a leopardess, carrying her kitten to safety

someone who will make him wait for her to come out of the shower

someone whose smallest movements are most amazing: the falling of her hair over her shoulder, the deep sigh when she sleeps

someone who maps out every ticklish part of his body, and uses her knowledge strictly for evil

someone who paints their bodies black and makes love under the stars

someone who burns through a chest like the first shot of scotch

someone whose tongue nervously traces the roof of her mouth

someone who stopped listening to Bob Dylan after he sold out to China

someone who who smells faintly of coffee, cigarettes, perfume, shampoo

someone who understands the unforgivable importance of life

stay

he said
stay with me


and like the leaves that
fluttered to their feet
on that october day,
her excuses fell away

and she stayed.

Light

What I feel inside when I think of you is light; it brightens my day. And like a delicate flower, heavied with dew, I stretch towards the morning sun.

She clasps the rag with crooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure of the world,
She stands.

She watches from her mountain walls,
The wrinkled sea beneath her crawls,
And like a thunderbolt,
She falls.

Changes

Its today: all of yesterday
Dropped away among the
Fingers of light and
Sleeping eyes of the night.
Tomorrow
Will come in gentle footsteps
To remove sorrow;
The ascent of the sun
Has already begun.

....

From memories
Of the birds that chanted to me
That sweet morning,
From the
Beginning notes of yearning,
From the thousand
Responses of my heart never to cease,
From the
Myriad aroused words:
Words stronger,
More potent than any;
Such as now
starts scene revisiting.

Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth,
Great sun!
While we bask,
We two together.

Winds blow north,
Or winds blow south;
Day come white,
Or night come black;
Home, or
Rivers and mountains away from home;
Smiling all the time,
Minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Low hangs the moon;
It rose late.
It lags:
I think it is
Heavy with love.

I wake up every morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounds and as impossible as it actually is, happy. But during the course of each day my heart will descend from my chest into my stomach. By early afternoon, I am overcome by the feeling that nothing is right, or nothing is right for me, and by the desire to be alone. By evening I am fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of my grief, alone in my aimless confusion, alone even in my loneliness. I am not sad, I repeat to myself over and over, I am not sad. As if I might one day convince myself. Or fool myself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because my life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. I fall asleep with my heart at the foot of my bed, like some domesticated animal that is no part of me at all. And each morning I wake with it again, in the cupboard of my rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon I am again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.