Getting Through

Your smile is fake and beautiful

Don't let people democratize

Your right to stir yourself

When you can't move a muscle.

Deep breaths, deep breaths,

People around you can afford

To fight and break and make a mess,

Energy is cheap and abundant.

Deep breaths.

Try to talk after the polite nod,

People can't see you busy

Deep inside your chest,

Servicing invisible demons.

Let yourself fall, love,

There is more to you

Than what can fall

And break completely.

Weak Love

My love is weak-shouldered, love,
When the blades in their pits ache,
I look for the sting of the cold
And hurry my warmth around you.

My love is slow-cantering, love,
When the sun rises in the bloom,
Half of my legs create distance
To better see your blush in pastels.

My love is closed-handed, love,
Your smiles light up the coins
Hidden on our valleys of frost,
I spend my summers making walls.

My love is high-fevered, love,
I contract contagions like a trader,
All of me is a battle-field, waiting,
You're my death-bed every time.

In My Hands - A Ghazal

Iron and fur brooked the cold in my hands,
Long before there was gold in my hands.

Too many stories end with morals,
But I write of the mould in my hands.

Dreams are won on fields outside dreams,
That's where I met the bold in my hands.

In closed rooms inside my chest there lie
Victims of what I sold in my hands.

I was worn where the dream was won,
My story is the old in my hands.

It is this: my youth is my age lost
Beneath every fold in my hands.

To survive ambition was to leave
All that I could not hold in my hands.

Miss Me For I Am With You

You miss me and grow envy
In the eyes set upon lovers
that can see the space between
Their toes.

Heart, you forget that love is inward,
To miss me is to have me to miss,
My hands and kisses are only
Your skin.