Everyday Danger

We walk battlefields every day

We go out into the cross-fires of aching perils

We pile on our heavy armor, our talismans

Praying we have a chance to deflect what might pierce us
Praying that like an action-movie hero,

we can somehow run through the enemy fire

between the raindrops

and come out spotless

Whether we like it or not,
Every one of us is armed
And not one of us is invincible

And we look around and see the fallen

And we see:

Danger is not a switch,

But a sliding scale

And the choice is to fear or to move,

To hide, or to breathe

For me, it depends on the day.

Resilience

My cell phone
has felt cold murky water
clasp hands over its head,
pushing it away from the air,
seeping between its buttons toward its green plastic motherboard.

It has tangoed with the ground, the flattest, hardest partner,
bouncing, skidding, sliding,
each hit rattling it through its casing to its wires.

It has pushed through on the last electron
clinging to its battery,
running on sparks, on pure momentum.

But like an old warrior,
like a creature that rises from ruins and cannot be crushed,
like a woman who leaves her cheating husband in the divorce room,
head held high, bright red stilettos, not a care in the world,
my phone still lights up and vibrates
when I get a text.
Scratched up, chipped,
but not a crack in sight. 

Turmoil

Hope and hopelessness are at war in me
Euphoria and despair like a cartoon angel and devil
The faith of my soul tells me I'm 
among the soft clouds;
Till cynicism hisses bitter in my ear
that it's all cardboard and fishing wire
And so, feeling still no leader I can trust,
I can only cling to what I love and what is beautiful
and try to do these things I want to do,
and try to be this thing I want to be

Lot's Wife

Standing on the midpoint between two horizons
I do not know which way to run.
Do I catch the hand of lightness
and let it lift me buoyant into freedom and fresh air,
leaving the smoke of golden flames far below and forgotten,
or take the hands of those left behind
And lose my upward momentum as I share it with them,
pulling them towards me and myself therefore back down?
Caught between myself and my hopeless city,
I stand weeping and frozen where I stand
till my body is a solid heavy pillar
of salty tears.

From a Friend

I want to feel what you feel.
I want to stand with you in the place that you are in.
I want to help you walk away from there,
if that is what you want.
I'm here to see the person you are,
not the backs of my own eyelids.
I might not understand your words,
but I'll understand your voice.
I want to be the one that speaks with you,
not at you.
I want to be the one that sits with you and is quiet.
I know you, you are like me.
Something has locked you out;
I want to let you come home.

Just a thought

I can never be truly alone--
I will always have myself to share anything with,
joy or pain.
Because in the end,
nobody will ever love me more than I love myself.
And I think maybe that's something I should tell myself,
that we should all tell ourselves,
 more often.

Commitment

If you panic
You can drown
In six inches of love
Forgetting you could stand up any time
To find the air outside is cold
And the water so warm

Yes, so warm that you thought
 It was burning you
 But it wasn't

Loud

So often people that don’t know me

And even people that do

Smile down at my small frame and say

“You’re so quiet.”

But what do they mean?

Because sometimes I feel like there’s something at my core

That is constantly combusting,

a continuous explosion of energy and sound

and if I don’t give it a constant outlet the pressure will blow me apart.

And few things explode quietly.

No, its sound waves boom in my blood like thumping bass

when my head overflows with poetry my pencil can’t spit out fast enough

when the music I hear fills my lungs with more electricity than air

And the electricity expands into blinding light that illuminates me from the inside out

it feels like no act of self-expression will be enough

to release the screams and the song and the speech of my soul,

As if it will burst out like air from a paper bag someone’s squeezing.

So it’s funny that people call me quiet

When really, I am so loud.