Love Words

I tried writing you love poems.

I tell you this because you care so much and

I want you to know that I care too.

Not as much as you

Perhaps

But enough to make my heart go beat beating hard

When I see you.

Enough to make my words get stuck

In my teeth when you’re around

My tongue prying them out and

Making an attempt at intelligible conversation.

They suck.

The poems, I mean.

They feel old between my fingers,

Clichés worn and tarnished and

Nothing feels here or now or as much as I love you.

I can’t give you these poems because

You deserve better but I don’t know

How to do that.

So here are my emotions

Ironed flat onto the page like my heart

Steamrolled by, left inky tracks.

Can we pretend these words can capture

My smile

When I see the screen light up with your name?

The ache the need the desire the want.

Can we act like “I miss you” stands in

For long talks, long walks, conversations that

Left me wanting to know more?

It almost hurts in a way to know that

Others have felt this too

Because it’s so personal that I want to believe

I’m the only one who’s ever missed

Or loved

Or wanted

You.

Please act like this is an acceptable

Though unconventional

Love poem.

The words bled out of my heart

Onto the keys

Before I could stop them. 

Self Esteem

What if at the grocery store

Instead of a self-checkout lane

You went through a self-esteem line

And purchased good thoughts

About yourself

Made up on the spot

By your very own personal and all around well-intending

Self-esteemer. 

San Francisco

The clouds slip slowly down from the sky, clutching desperately onto the buildings that jut into the blue and reach hopefully towards God.

On a hill, cluttered close like too many teeth in too small a mouth, their roots hugging tight to the ground as if they’re terrified of letting go, like they might slide slowly down the hill and into the unknown future or backwards into the, god-forbid, desolate and unfashionable past.

Roads wind down, lazily forming side streets, cutting corners like manic taxi drivers in a rush to nowhere really, carving out a slice of solemn-as-a-preacher-black in between the fruit-pie colored pastel that cloaks the houses on the hills like a breezy summer dress.

Two men, playing checkers, chicken-bone fingers plucking ivory bone pieces, hunched over their chess game, bent over by life. Like the burdens they’d carried in their years had been much heavier then their frail frame had allowed and had slowly yet deliberately pressed all the spirit out of them, deflating, pushing out vitality one fatal step at a time. Like a child squeezes a balloon under his fists, slowly letting the air escape until all that is left is a husk that floats eerily away on the wind and leaves forgotten.

Rat-a-tat. A beggar broken by the side of the road, legs crossed, eyes down, resigned to his fate. You would step over him, pass right by him, not even notice him. Rat-a-tat. Except for the quiet rhythm that his begging cup tattoos on the cold night air. Coins against plastic Rat-a-tat. Subtle but distinct. His heart-beart, his pulse, his middle-finger to life that though it has kicked him in the gutter, he lives. He breathes. He is society’s lowest. He is still here.

Life has been good to her, pampering, spoiling, feeding her choicest tidbits and dainty morsels that she’s snapped up in a heart-beat because food is comfort and food is love and food is safe. Her flesh, once so supple, (she had been a fine woman in earlier years), now bulges and testifies to her newfound religion: one that does not believe in self-denial nor, consequently, preach a doctrine of exercise or restraint.

Snapshots of people and places, chapters of lives, completely opposite yet more similar than any of them will ever know. Too many faces to count, too many to even remember. Each a story weaving together to create a city –their city—that hides itself in the fog and welcomes strangers with a misty cold kiss.