write a poem/write anything/doesn’t have to be a good poem/doesn’t have to be good./write about your therapist without using the word “therapist”/not because you’re ashamed/but because you have the tendency to wrap every real human interaction into a neat arrangement of metaphors/and call it love./do not write that you love her/only that sometimes you lie to her/like you’d lie to your sister

Write a story. Write anything. Doesn’t have to be a good story; doesn’t have to be good. Write a block of prose about your morning walk without mentioning the dream you escaped from (and how it felt so real your body stung as you awoke). Make nature a metaphor for your life and the seasons a metaphor for your past. Don’t write about your past, only that you’re afraid of October, as if October itself is the enemy and not the thing it contains. Write around the thing. Give the thing a backdrop but don’t color its face. Leave it unfinished. Leave it, and

months later, re-reading your poem,

realize you’ve forgotten the dream.

It’s faded: the pain of it, the shame of it, the

awful fiction of it; you never wrote about it,

not directly, not truthfully. it’s okay. sometimes

it’s okay not to write, to get through october

with closed eyes & a tight grip on the steering wheel.

it’s okay to write instead about the seasons or

the school newspaper or oak trees or

anything that doesn’t keep you up at night.

it’s okay to write a beautiful lie until it becomes

your truth. who knows- it could even become a beautiful truth.

Just write. Write anything.

The graphite in your pencil doesn’t care

Where you’re taking it. Take it somewhere. And when you get there,

Flip to the first page of your old journal and start reading. See how far

You’ve come, and how far the road stretches ahead. Open your eyes; look

In the mirror; look at yourself. Smile. Write about what you see, now. Write anything.

Even months later, we pause

Before embracing. We are wary

Of one another: the hurt we might carry,

The pain we could give.

It’s difficult to close the distance now,

To get in our cars and drive forward

Into a changing world;

To start again. What

Have we gained? We wasted so many months

Of warmth, lying awake in our beds,

Letting feelings become stagnant. We thought

About each other. About ourselves. And

When our loves expired, we left them

Sitting out in our front lawns. We watched them

Decompose from our windows. We let it go on

For too long: always inside, looking out.

We thought this was a way to live, a way

To keep ourselves safe, away

From connection. We shielded our hearts, wrapped

Our mouths, afraid to breathe other air: what

Have we gained? we implore of our

Cat, who seems to shrug, stretched in the sun.

Our empty words bounce off disinfected surfaces

& find their way back to us.

They always find their way back - so do

Our loves. Maybe in different forms, through text

Or email or carefully penned letter. Maybe from

Different people. Like stray pets, ragged & hungry,

They arrive for us, just as we’re wondering

If we’ll ever get back what we had before, realizing

We never asked for what we needed, exchanging peace

For a lifetime of trivialities.

Love, then, was the question -

The answer, it seemed, was pawing gently

At our front doors; waiting

To be let in.

we collect around splatters of color like worshippers in church, stare

silently up at the miles of paint, turn our heads this way and that, try

to make sense of it.

the last time anything made sense i was doing a handstand

in an empty bathtub during a 7.0 magnitude earthquake,

and i feel kind of like that now,

except the blood isn’t rushing so fast to my head.

i think it is, in a metaphorical sense. i think i am having a

sympathetic nervous response except my eyes aren’t dilating.

i think i am a member of this church now, praying to the god of art

that something in this painting will speak to me

like rembrandt never could.

the first time i died i saw these same splatters, except

they were all one shade of red and nothing about them was artistic.

afterwards, i was reborn as a middle class family’s dog, and then as a chicken in a cage,

and then as a potted aloe plant, and then as myself. I think this is the

least satisfying existence i’ve had thus far. i’m

still waiting for it to mean something.

everyone else has left now. it’s been at least two hours

and they’re starting to turn off the lights, closing the place down. i think

i must be invisible because the guards haven’t said anything to me.

or maybe that’s because i’m a fly now(that would explain the double vision and the wings

on my back). I just wish i could be who i was before. nothing’s better than being a person,

i think. when you’re a person you’re allowed to make mistakes.

i’ve been in the air too long, so when they finally turn the lights off & the guards

leave, i settle onto my favorite blue paint splatter and doze off, wondering where

jackson pollock is now. most of all i hope that when he died he thought his life

meant something. maybe now he’s a person again and his existence is not so sad after

all. maybe he’s a fly like me, or maybe he’s really gone forever.

i wouldn’t know. don’t come to me for answers. i’m only a bug.

in the morning the lights come on again and i fly to the next painting, hovering

far above it so nobody sees me. today i worship in a different church.

tonight i die a different death.

you know how it feels to drive at night? how the

houses seem to change to shadows,

and, devoid of their daylight vibrance, they shift

in unfamilar circles around you?

think of all the places you've been. all the miles you've walked

filled with the sun, feeling one way

for one person all of the time, everywhere. and then

in the blink of an eye-- or, rather, over months of

distance and what your friends call growth,

it all begins to look different. but why?

you are lost in a crowd; you do not look for him

you are listening to music;; you feel far from him

you are writing;;; but not about him, now

you feel

less than

whole

& then you choose to let the sun back in,

through a different window. or you

learn to conjure it within, all by yourself.

but you cannot shake the feeling that something has changed.

that without him, there is a piece of the puzzle

you lost along the way; a piece of yourself

eternally stuck between couch cushions

and impossible to find.

loneliness sits in a chartreuse space, it

feigns happiness, its yellow-green brightness

weighs me down, I cannot hold it.

I rejoice in the dark red of alone

the nights to myself, oh the writing, the talking

out loud when no one can hear, but tonight

it folds in on itself, becomes a new color.

I cannot call it “mustard” or “dandelion”

for that implies it also has a shape, or a flavor,

when really it is nothing more than

years of empty heaviness and an impossibly ugly word:

chartreuse. I have begged for a comfortable gray,

but it does not hold comfort, holds only

all of the nights I wished that you were there

[with your sky blue shirt & worn black shoes] but

you weren’t. I’m afraid you never will be. not since

I’ve painted my house all the same shade of ambiguous yellow,

locked myself inside, told you to stop looking

for the chartreuse eyesore that sits just beyond

every neighborhood.

While floating in this dreamless space

I discover that time is a multi-faceted beast

too fickle to hold the weight of my many dimensions

disappearing continuously, melting, solidifying,

creating an unrecognizable blur

I have promised to live unapologetically:

done my best to eliminate regrets

erased the most disgusting parts of my past

but in nights like these, what else is there to ponder over?

I want to put a solid image to this feeling,

to evaporate into the comforts of a metaphor.

but tonight there is nothing left but honesty; I have no poetry

left in me. tonight there is nothing but a singular fear:

that I will die without having ever lived;

that I will fall asleep without anything beautiful

to dream about.

my words do not want to be devoured.

they sit like green bean casserole on your otherwise-empty plate,

asking to be picked at, played with,

eaten in small and delicate bites.

they do not apologize for what they are-

you may find them unappetizing, or simply boring

but they ask only to be read, and later digested,

perhaps leaving you with a somewhat pleasant feeling.

I cannot ask for even this-

-my words do not beg to be liked.

they do not stand up on stage and scream

I-LOVE-YOU, they do not wait for applause,

and perhaps you will find them discarded in the pit

after the orchestra has left.

they will not become youtube sensations,

they will not go viral- perhaps they will not be read

by anyone except for you.

so if you happen upon my words,

pick them up. keep them to yourself,

hold them for a minute and then

blow them into the wind like dandelion seeds.

perhaps some of those seeds will reach soil and grow.

perhaps no one will think they are beautiful.

perhaps my words don't mind.

Dear ______,

By keeping me in the (I hate this term)Friendzone, you have taught me what love means. I cannot imagine what would have happened if you would have given in and taken me out on a date if your heart was not in it. I can no longer feel anger towards you or towards myself regarding all of this. I have said before that anger was a mostly useless emotion, and now I will tell you why: it’s blinding. It has closed my eyes before and I will not let it close them again.

Here’s the truth: I am not yet ready to move on. I don’t think I’ll be able to until our friendship fades, which is hard to swallow, but I just can’t see you as more than a friend. I hear your voice and my heart leaps- it leaps, ______- and I cannot force it back down. When I first told you I had feelings for you, two Springs ago, I assumed that if you didn’t like me back I would just stop having those feelings. It’s laughable now, but I have always been such an insufferable idealist, though it’s not just about hope.

Allow me one last extended metaphor:

When my feelings began to take root, I assumed that they were only pesky weeds that could be easily removed. So I ignored them, until I looked over and they had grown into a sapling; I couldn’t pull it out with my hands. So I brought out a shovel to remove the pesky thing, only to discover that it was beautiful. I left it, hoping it would get easier to destroy it as time went by, but soon I began to enjoy its shade. I discarded the shovel and the axe and all of my fears and climbed to the top of its branches, and ______, the view was magnificent. It made me see everything in a new way. My garden was larger than I thought, and all the love I have ever felt blossomed continuously around my tree. Surrounded by all of this life, I felt less alone; depression visited less often, stayed for shorter periods of time.

But my tree is still fragile and cannot survive on its own. I have tended to it, almost out of habit, for the past two years; I have known no other way. Eventually, though, I will begin to wander away from this beautiful tree. It will die silently and without complaint as I plant new gardens.

When I happen upon it again, I will discover that it has lost its leaves, and immediately I will know what that means. I will mourn it, trying to remember what it once looked like in full bloom, but I will not stay near it; the memories of it will hurt me too much. And as I am sleeping in the branches of a new tree, I will hear a soft thud in the far distance. It will echo in every chamber of my heart; the last bit of love I had for you will leave my body.

But it’s no use crying now, or imagining that endings are permanent or set in stone. I’m not there yet- the tree of my love is still full of beautiful green leaves. Just as I’ve said after all of my letters to you:

The story continues on.

With blossoming love,

_______

I wished this upon myself, and no one else-

I did not consider you, I dove headfirst,

smiling at the adrenaline rush but speaking only

of how it hurt when I hit the bottom

and could not swim back up.

I hoped to find you, somewhere in that water,

searching for something I had not lost.

I told you everything you did not want to hear,

you swam away. I followed. I begged for you to come back,

whispered,

"it's okay, you don't have to love me"

through the silence of the ocean that separated us.

I knew that you could hear me,

and waited patiently for you to return.

I dove in to save you, only to drown myself:

through all of this I had forgotten to come up for air.

I would like to believe that in the end you came back to me,

finding my body drifting and covered with years of algae and

weighing nothing at all. I would like to believe that in the end

you loved me, not out of want but out of need,

slowly drifting back to me after years of swimming against the current.

though, now that it's all said and done,

I'm afraid that you left the water long ago-

I fear that I've lost you, love, and in doing so

I've lost everything.

standing outside,

I turn and feel a strong gust of wind blow suddenly

on my face. And something new

rises within me, washes over me like a wave,

cleanses me, again

& again &

again.