Maybe

Tonight, Momma’s head is spinning
As she follows Noah and me with her eyes

We must be her memories
Still feeling the crash some nights
With people crazy enough to seek guidance from our heartbeats

Sometimes,
I wish I could get life to swallow me whole
And cradle me in its collarbone
Tell me I’m as beautiful as the boy born before me
And that I’m more than the uncertain metaphors that spill from my fingers
Advertising truth through history’s ghosts.
I sketch my anxious thoughts in the outline of her time line
As she watches us with a slight smile and a swiftly hidden tear

Maybe one day it’ll be enough
Maybe one day we’ll be enough

“Time heals all wounds.” It sounds so close to the truth, but time heals nothing, it just passes. See, if I’ve learned anything from my family, we were destined to crash sooner or later. So as I wash off last night each morning, I focus on the past and my thoughts race forward. History won’t just catch up with me, it’s insistent on overtaking my vision and continuing on incessant repeat. The problem is, I still remember the first boy I ever adored, and the last. They’re one in the same. A Kentucky dreamer with fireworks for eyes and an IPod of slam poetry. I never trusted his smile--I always had to work too hard for it--but I loved the color his cheeks turned when he was nervous, or uncomfortable, or telling the truth. That boy was my summer, and fall, and winter. We wrote poems side by side, the only difference was, he had talent and soul cowering behind a shield of comedy. I fell for his charm during afternoon adventure when he was caught in the arms of the sun and the uncertainty of English downpours. As I watched the wheels turn in his mind, I couldn’t help but recognize how the moonlight looked shining off of the hazy glass of his alcoholic eyes. I attempted to shush the warning signs, but time passed and distance remained. My feet didn’t belong with him. I knew this, but my mind remained reluctant to leave. I tried to separate myself from the pictures that lined my walls, because some accidents you see coming in just enough time to do nothing about them. Like watching your favorite glass bowl suicide to ground, not quick enough to save it from catastrophe. We were both blind to the rules of good timing. I should have realized this when the roles reversed. Once home, he started saying, “I love you” without being prompted. But it was the day he sent me poems that made me question distance and time and stupidity. Timing smothered all possibility. He stood in his corner of Kentucky, and I ran to the edge of New Jersey and we stretched out our arms, hoping they would find a way to wrap around 800 miles of highway and bring us back home to English summertimes sealed with thai-food dinners, sleepovers, and too many sun-filled rain storms to count with fingers. With Southern gods dancing on our eyelashes and too much love to know what to do with, we held on, and on, and on…

People inspire me...

So I write about them.


For Saum:

There's a man with laughter in the creases of his eyes
And yes, she is certainly his daughter
A form of beautiful ripped from the pages of magazines
With a grace inside of her that flies
Holding a book of prophets in one hand
And drunken hilarity in the other

She is lightening and memory and merry-go-rounds

With a perfectly flawed soul worn on her sleeve
She follows the sun with adventure
Speaking the words I wish I knew
Through stories the mouth can't tell fast enough

She thinks in poetry
And I can only wish to some day love with the same intensity she does

It's the red jeep secrets
And moonlit talks that let us escape,
And dig deeper
And pounce on a life much to large for our eighteen years

Oh but she'll do it
Because as the city lights woke her
She fell in love with the world
Floating on electric nights she could only sleep for a moment
Never tip-toeing through life
Or apologizing for crossing the brink from comfort to confusion
As the wind swallowed up the bird's songs and played them like banjos

She is rare

One of those
Who can talk about life like a bowl of pink light
Shining from the valley
That others just call morning

In a school where people grow like weeds
She is the name that comes to mind when I think of how a person should be

One of those
Whose got a fire like I've never felt.
An offbeat sense of humor, inherited from her mother,
A smile that spreads to the eyes, a characteristic from her father,
And a messy, blemished beauty all her own

She is not just words
She is soul

A barefoot dreamer
With Lebanese gods dancing in the sunlight of her thoughts

One of those
Who changes your life just by being part of it
Because home is wherever she is.




For Brooke:

Stripped down to poetry,
Surrounded by words,
She will apologize
For engulfing us with happiness
When all we want to do is watch
The glitter dance on her eyelashes
And that beautiful smile of hers spread
To the apples of her cheeks,
An image so stunning that to her didn't used to feel like home.

But now she's stuck in it.
She's stuck in that smile
Because she deserves nothing less.

Hell, she deserves all of it...
For the compliments that pour from a mind filled with distant dreams
Like a mirror reflecting back all the best parts of her.
For a grace
That leaps from the page and reminds me why I continue writing.
And for quiet confidence
That glows in the silence of every smile she walks by
Echoing the remarkable beauty that she will forever insist she doesn't have.

If you're looking for someone to envy
Stop searching,
She's right here.

Hey Bartender, you've got layers of bad decisions behind you

It's bare knuckle loving
And crying babies
In the back of his bar
Selling alcohol to innocence
And calling it "philanthropy"

He sure as hell knows how to make himself feel golden,
Level with a God
That he insists he never barters with
But truth never really hides behind thinly veiled ugly

There's always an ear left uncovered
When the weather is blushing
Whispering piccolos to children that aren't his
Telling them, grow up my beauties
Make Daddy proud
Lose yourself in winter's layers of loving
And come home safe
Make sure you live within my levels of acceptable
But do as you please,
No one's watching

Poem me

Poem me a Playground
Meet me where artists paint the world prettier than I've ever seen it
I need to re-think my storms
Convince you there are harmonicas in my music
That melody is my tongue-tied birthmark

Someone once told me I could use a little apathy
I feel too much
Get stuck in my rainstorms
I've been dreaming in summertime fireflies for far too long
While the world drowns out radiance in flurries of escaping white
That linger to create grey

You dance your way home
An artist, pulling birds from the sky and painting them beautiful
You color my world childhood
In your paper-back notebook
Pouring passion on paper
Covering grey with a blanket of warmth

What a smile you have, lady
You make those birds itch to sing with you
You remind me of days when scientists and poets were the same people

You make me wish time moved backwards
That feet moved hurriedly in reverse
That the wind swallowed up the bird's songs and played them like banjos

So please, follow me to the playground, lady, the swing set could use some paint
And tonight, I'd like to fly

sometimes i think life actually wants me to stay here
when i see exclamation points in the eyes of my friends
extending their arms for balance
loaning me their alcoholic words
and a light

we're all free spirits and passionate runaways drowning
in the laughter that escapes from the creases of our eyes
and breathes in what the sun pours auburn

by now i could have been drowning
in everything we are

oh but i could be something
when stripped down to poetry
writing a song
to anyone who will listen

and i know, i know they will meet me there
they will meet me where heroes save the sinking
where music flows through the grace of fingertips
and flashes of fireworks illuminate our nights

because we all know
life's not supposed to rhyme
it's supposed to echo sounds of playgrounds at recess
so i hope that when they breathe they think of happiness
and dive right in