Broken People

It is effort, I know,

But cast honest eyes around
And you will find broken people everywhere.
These are sunflowers that turned too much and broke;
They carry their own Suns now.
They carry a jar of honey with them
Because wounds and infections are too common,
And sugar is useless.
Their hands and brows are knit
with lines they did not have when they wrote their first love-letters;
The graffiti on their skin
Cannot be contracted into creation.
Look away, then,
They are too much effort, I know,
Their covers are leather you cannot afford,
And their stories will have you looking for references you clearly don't have.
Walk up to them and become friends,
But they are not pure scripture,
Do not expect your deeds to sit alongside theirs
You will breathe their air and your body will be revolution,
Their colours will find friends in your shadows
And paint murals inside your chest,
Until you cannot piece apart their thunder from the quiet of your flesh.
Taste their unbecoming and
You will yearn to shatter into nightmares
That you may become the master of your dreams.


Image Source: http://alicexz.deviantart.com/art/Airplanes-200997113

Reignition

No red-lettered date marks
the national holiday on which I will step outside my house of cards
built with razor-sharp memories,
But I trust that day to come.
And then I will not think twice of its random collapsing on my flesh,
Of being buried under metal edges,
Of losing old skin.

I will have sewn myself together
And made a backpack of every patch you kissed,
I will stuff all doubts in it, carry it without choice,
and search for broken people that have reconstructed themselves.
I will scout for love so hot
that it burns your hands just once
I worry that the scar-tissue on my fingers refuses to understand warmth again.
I will look for brazen gamblers
Who can cajole me into investing my life's savings into untapped opportunities
after having slept on streets
through cold nights.
I worry I have become a miser.
I will dig their backyards with tired hands and find skeletons we can bond over,
Ignoring the smell of your gardens beneath my fingernails.
I will trust the pepper in their lies
The way I did yours
when all your footsteps were the correct direction.
I will crush the chalk in their bones and draw on their living-room walls
Until the misery of our experiments with other people
Become the preface to better stories,
I will add your name to a blank page
And be grateful for being the flint
That taught me ignition.

Image Source: Delawer Omar