Made like god, like god we rise.

tell yourself

When the rain light ends
And the fresh damp earth
Smiles back at you from below
And everything is singing their best
The umbrellas go down and the deep breaths go in and I tuck my hand in yours
For a swing and a squeeze.

When the day terrors stop spinning gold
And you know the choice is yours and sleep is rest instead of escape
You know the beauty can reside.
It can stay
Not just inside where you know it has been hiding in the corner behind that large rock
Hoping it won't be found because when it does
You will be truly lost
To your heart's captor
And as much as you want it you fear it just the same.
Not because you know it.
Because you don't.

Let me go, beauty. I will make you beauty again. Let me go, doubt.
I won't ever doubt again.

Your love is life and life is beauty and beauty is tangled with pain and pain with love.
Tell yourself,
You Are.

choke it out

I am the garden
You the grasses
.
I flourish in temperate conditions
While you mow yourself down frequently.
And I know this love of ours will get choked out
By your selfishness
And my creation of an imaginary land
Where we
Are not the bird and the fish.
We thought we were at home.
But where would we live?

grief

It pulls you like a knife across an unwilling participant.
It pushes you in the middle of a song you used to embrace.
It makes you want to dance and march and parade around all your feelings
til you have none at all.
Or at least about that.
Because focus is better than that. It will take the place
Of where your joy used to sit
And hop
And hope
And highlight your moments of floating into the ceiling at the drop of a few hefty words, spoken just to you.

Disembodied, you feel, and angry and sad and all the sunflowers are not in the fields you ride by everyday. But the way that you see yourself is bigger and you're happy, true, whole.
By
yourself.

You are who you were created to be!
And don't you ever forget it.
This grief is a thing very real, very deep, and you are deep enough for it.
Pull up those bootstraps and put on your favorite scarf because it's going to be a lot of cold hard work
inside
Before you get to where you're going.

Sunflowers and dirt
trailing behind
and before.

Prison

It's easy for you to escape
While I'm trapped in these memories of us
I come home to my door
Solitary, a dark apartment waiting for me
Instead of the times I came home to a light on and you hiding behind the door
Waiting to kiss me hello.
It's easy for you to escape to a place I have never existed
While I am here in all the things we did.
The bus stops. The grocery. The people. The rooms. The comforter rustle.
It all reminds me of you and I am trapped
A prisoner to my own memories
Of my past future
With you.

Now all I have to hear me cry are the two clocks ticking in staccato
They mark the time moving without us
With just me
And I miss you so much.
This part just seems cruel.

strapped in.

you and I we swirl around this track I hope
will take us back
to the beauty whence we came.
but this time like
last time
and before
this war
I am the responder only
taking numbers like a punched phone
operator behind friendly fire
who never lets one ring by.
without a nod and a smile of
encouragement
at getting run over
and she signed up for this
her civic duty because if she can't fight
well at least she can answer phones.

they ring so painfully and at first she hopes there will be more
she can do, more to give and
support and throw herself into, anything to avoid the silence of her heart
when the ringing stops
don't stop please
when it stops
the ring of nothing
fills the space and expands the ties
and she comes undone.
because taking the calls is better than fighting the war.

but this once
she picks up a silent phone
and
dials.
it's the same roller coaster, I just strapped in this time.