In your bones I’ll grow flowers
so you can pick the
Love me…
Love me not’s…
out of your chest
in hopes that in the last petal you pull you will find
Yourself.

Tell me stories.

Tell me of the times you went searching for
mystics and pots of gold at the end of rainbows,
asked for a waterbed for Christmas because you thought
that it would make you feel more like the Little Mermaid and less like
everyone else.

Whatever happened to those?

Whatever happened to those songs you used to sing yourself to sleep to?
The wind you wrapped yourself in
and the stars you slept with
when they fell from God’s hands
pretending it was him.

Why do you equate growing up with not imagining?

Putting weights in your arteries making it harder
for you to swim back to the place inside of you that you used to escape to
when you were a kid?

When was the day that you looked at yourself and cried
because you didn’t understand your face anymore
when those freckles are just signs that the sun finds you irresistible
and every wrinkle you get represents something far more beautiful and
truthful
than any poem I’ll ever have the ability or courage to write

How come you can’t see past your reflection to the inside of glass
to where your face is the counterpart to everything I thought never existed.
So I’m off to collect all the mirrors you shattered
because you couldn’t stand yourself.
I will build you a refuge to reflect every beautiful thing you have forgotten
that lives inside you still.

Give me your vampires
your nightmares
every bit of baggage on your back
give me your monsters
bad tastes and bit lips.

Stand still.

Let me figure out the math from which your bones grow
with the soft part of my hands
finding colors in your organs
pulling music from your ribs

Trying to understand
why you go searching for things that never left you to begin with?
why you wait for messengers to fall from the sky and pick up your prayers
as if you couldn’t answer them yourself.

For there are things far more important inside of you
than the greatest hymns and equations
don’t think that just because you don’t have the answers now
you never will

Because not all questions have remedies not all stars have names
and not every lover feels the same

But we all feel.

And what affects you might not affect me
and I might not be able to understand where you’re coming from
sometimes
but I can be there to hear you when you feel like the entire world
has forgotten your name.

I can be there like a surprise at the end of the day
when you feel change doesn’t exist
And everything and everyone is the same.

I will be there in the morning –

before the first rooster crows or alarm clock rings
waking you from the safety of your dreams

I will come.

Bearing shovels in my whispers
planting flowers in your bones
so when you laugh there may be petals in your giggles
that you pull out of your mouth reminding you
of the beautiful things you may have forgotten
that are growing inside you

Still.