Oh, if he could love me back.

My desire to be near to you is always clearest when we're about to leave. 

I forget how you have carried me through time in your cloud.

And as we descend there comes 

the realization that I won't see you again

for who knows how long.

(Because really, I don't have a reason to.)

The mastered melody of how you speak to me will dissipate.   

And I won't be seen in the way you see me- clearly, poignantly. 

I will forget that you are magic and how you remind me that I am too.

That you are the kind of man who fills me up with value in a single glance. 

So I will conveniently forget the feeling

I will lose the glow

I will forget until tomorrow 

And the tomorrow after that

And the next time I see you

Whenever that may be

You will look the same 

All the same 

But 

A metal band 

On your left hand

Will remind me

Just how far away you are. 

Bluebirds

Regret is not the right word

But “nostalgia” is too soft

It is in the distance

Your eyes forbade to meet

The downcast spirit

Hiding in my skin

It only comes out at night, 

the second after the second after the second-

I am alone.

And among the trees I descend into hollowness, 

where I may resemble 

and deserve the back until next time

The next night

 A new attack,

I crouch low neath the bluebirds 

to find courage 

under their flapping wings 

pulsing toward me

And I bite!

I fly!

The magnitude of the sun

Refills my hollow whole

Until your lifeless gaze

Demands I give the pieces back

So homeward I choke every memory

Every spot, every syllable-

Watch the soldiers of my mind bleed out and away

Because really I needed yet another

One more reminder

That I have become a shell

A skeleton, piecemeal, or penultimate

Voices of bluebirds

Humming your song to the ghosts in the grave

They sing not of regret-

Not of memory-

They sing to grieve lost magic and blanked eyes

Heart out.

Don't worry about me wearing my heart on my sleeve-

it's spilling out of my eyes

Paving new star-crossed streets

It's carrying cries of generations

lost / 

It is eliciting

a warning

to anyone else.

I cannot wear my heart on my sleeve.

I cannot wear it anywhere.

It does not belong to me.

It is stored away in his trash.

I cannot wear my heart on my sleeve

because

I do not know

where it has gone.

Sort of.

You told me that day.

The most southeast we could possibly be,

(And we never sat there.)

Deadness of light on a linoleum table,

(And that light was always out.)

Isolated from play time,

(Because we were always late to recess, we were slow eaters.)

You told me.

I knew that look, when you would begin to cry.

But you cried at everything,

So why should I be worried this time?

I’ve begged my memory too many times for context.

What I remember:

Misty-eyed you: “Something bad happened.”

I wish I could have understood then that you were a museum, you were your father’s occupation, your lineage; you were the love child of an angry mother and an immature father, the product of a Catholic marriage, a product of your swim team and your banisters and your light orange walls.

“Did someone die?”

“Sort of.”

But how could someone sort of die?

How could someone be dead and also not?

I thought I knew that look you had. Sort of.

I think we were 9 years old.

You told me, in those words,

“People are fragile.” Sort of.

“But you can’t tell anyone.” Sort of.

“He went to Hell.” Sort of.

Before desperation made any sense-

Before depression and suicide were terms in our vernacular.

Before,

Before I knew that people sometimes take their own lives.

Because to develop is to mature is to learn is to comprehend

Comprehend something as horrific, as toxic

As suicide.

“Sort of.”

My picture of love.

It's a working definition.

Love is,

• the gradual collapse of self-fears, insecurities, doubts
• recognizing that what you have with that person is greater than you alone
• feeling at home
• vulnerability 
• beautiful impermanence 
• warmth in your heart
• that spark of joy when you look up to see that person across the room
• the diminishing of fear
• letting go of different pasts that you thought might become futures
• becoming more like Christ: rich in love, slow to anger, full of compassion, exercising patience, full of joy and full of life.

place-holding.

She caught her reflection

like a firefly,

diagonal, forward on a street window.

The city made her feel

wide and alone.

"Skin"- the occasion for the torture

Capability of bondage, of compliments, of magic

His to believe I am enough:

a firefly hysteria upon a blemished city.

I used to dream

in the shadows of white horses

In thunder, in concrete

But your bouquet is a diminishing real.

Scrape me more, that I might know how to live.

In the name of a light.

In the name of holding a place.

We would have been safe.

"I'd have said 'Nothing' backward. 

He'd have said 'Yeah, buddy?' backward.
I'd have said 'Dad?' backward, which would have sounded the same as 'Dad' forward.
He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from 'I love you' to 'Once upon a time...'
We would have been safe."

-Jonathan Safran Foer

-- Dedicated in remembrance to the fallen of 9/11. You are never forgotten. --