Love song.

Perhaps you heard.

Love-screams filling my body.
A full-tilt/belt-it-out/body-soul song

traveling through kisses
crying out through hands,
belly, thighs, skin.

Meant for you,
meant for me,

sung for love.

Longing.

I wonder
if the longing, sometimes,
is more for the loving
than the lover.

Do you know what I mean?

Opening

I am like you,
afraid
but I am opening.


Winding threads of memory
pushing, pulling
slowly revealing

this full body of desire
tender
blossoming
fierce

hungry and vulnerable.

Like you (am I like you?)
I will open
and open again
and again

a pioneer
an astronaut
lifetimes spent dreaming
of the ultimate expedition
into the
deepest spaces
of human connection.

I am afraid,
but I am opening.

I am fissures to your cracks
chinks and holes to your fractures
rifts and clefts to your crevices

longing for exposure
(yes, please touch)
probing and plying
smoothing and sanding

changed for the revealing.

I am like you,
afraid
and I am opening.

Shift

Tonight I am
standing on the shore.
Sands shift beneath my feet and
I am waiting, even though
I tell myself I am standing/being/present.

But I know, in the deepest place of my
wanting, I am waiting.

There is, in this kind of waiting,
(for a love/lost love/found love/new love/old love)
a stirring born of hope
that can make you feel
so alive -

each grain
of shifting sand moved
in preparation for what might come,
the winds of blessed change
that forever alter
a landscape.

No one arrives.
Did you know this would happen?

I am here
standing,
wanting to be full and
alive without the waiting,
sands shifting beneath my feet.

The fire between us

Here we sit.
Not the first time,
but the first of any length of time,
the fire between us with
no middle in sight.

Not now,
indeed, not ever,
for you have found her: your true love.

And all I want to do is bless you.

All I want is your happiness,
and I am thankful, truly,
that there is a beautiful Italian woman
who speaks broken English and
turns you on like crazy and
loves you in all the ways
I never will. I am not jealous
and I don’t even want to cry.

We say our goodbyes and there
in the fire between us is
the hope that it might have been different.

Your arms open to me;
I fall in.
Alone with my choices,
feeling the loss of something never found.

Blessing II

What if I bless you?

I mean, really bless you.
Send you off with a kiss
and every best wish -
my precious message in bottle.
Set out to sea for unknown, exotic lands/
unknown, exotic hands.

More - what if give away every you there ever was?
Every incarnation.
Every possibility.

You as gravity.
You as adventure.
You as comic relief.
You as savior.

Give you away to everybody everywhere,
knowing the release will mean
someone on that distant shore will
catch you
claim you
unravel you
decipher you
understand you
love you.


And what if I'm ok with that?
What if that's the point?
Blessing you, and her, and everybody everywhere.
Knowing the sweetest gift is
the gentle opening of hands (of heart),
setting free what always and ever already was.

I will say:

I will say: I let your majesty move me.
Succumbed to your beautiful truth
in a sweet and satisfying surrender.
Open and bare and better for it,
stretched beyond where even you could find me.

Strong

I’d like to tell you to not be afraid,

You are strong enough and so am I.

But the telling of it is like promising fruit in the fall

when there was a killing frost so late in the spring

and the summer has been so dry

and the trees are struggling so.

It’s like that.

I long for us to be what we are born for

- bearers of delicious, juicy, fruit-

but I see the harsh while we are weathering, and you, little sister,

not rooted or hardened as I, must drop your leaves in such a season as this,

and seek nourishment.

And I, shaped by years of bitter seasons

recognize the storm deep within

urging, advancing, greater than the conditions that created me

allowing me this moment of calm and truth:

You are strong enough and so am I.

Blessing

I’m blessing you

with every breath I have.

I’m blessing you,

I promise, even

while my heart stops beating for a moment, even

while my mind quickly does its ritual dance of unworthiness, even

while this world of color and light flickers and fades.

I am blessing you

With every breath I have.

Unravel

If you unravel a heartache 
with hope to find its achey, tender core,
beware.

On your way, you will find your tears;
they come with the loss and regret 
that mark the journey.
Bring them with you to the center, for they are your guides. But know this:

It’s empty.

But more - it’s yours.
Completely.
It belongs to no other, no matter how you try to give it away. It’s yours and yours alone.
And it’s up to you to make peace with the emptiness.

That’s where a heart lives – in the expanse of emptiness.

It’s true; you will be tempted to see the emptiness as abandonment.
Betrayal.
Proof of your undeniable unworthiness of love.
Again and again and again.

But remember, if you’re
brave enough to attempt the journey,
have hope enough to unravel the mystery, 
and faith enough to seek the truth –

you are strong enough to sit in the center of the sorrow.

And when you do – sit there in that place – let yourself untangle. See the threads that wound you up tight and bound your heart in ache loosen.

And then, from that seat of power, watch.
Filaments.
Lifted out of the achey mass. 
Your loves. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your aspirations. Your promises.
Seen, perhaps, as if for the first time.

Let them be lifted. Let them be free. Let them dance and float and fly 
even (especially) 
if it means they leave you. 
Let them go.

Again,
and again,
and again.

Recovery

I am stepping

What once was granite
Is grass
Once shards
Now sand
Warm and soft
Beneath my feet.

The shift came with the tide
 And with the moon
Sharing her secrets
I listened
As though
Through the bottom of my feet
Through the lapping
The encroaching and retreat.

I am rising
I am sun
I give you gifts of sweat and grime
A beauty blinding
Binding
Biding
All time