waning crescent.

If you could only give me

A crescent moon of a chance

I would show you

How to hold tightly onto everything

How to eat with your hands

How to burn the stars onto your skin

Like they are tattoos

And you are seventeen,

Teaching your parents how to be young again.

This terrifies you.

The way you want to take the world like an orange

Peel back its skin

Find me underneath

Like a Saturday afternoon in late autumn

My leaves keep falling

I want to teach you how to be a salt harvester

Cracking the crust of pink and white

Until water flows

I will show you how to bleed from your fingertips

And rest your head on my shoulder

Even though it’s mostly bone

I contradict myself

I am large, I contain multitudes

I am a rock on a hilltop

And from me you can hear the ocean

I am a burning plantation

When the world was young, you planted these seeds

And I grew, reaching out towards the sun

Now, as everything burns,

You tell me I’ve never smelled so sweet

Now that I have nothing left to hide

If you would only let me

I would take your feet into my hands

And wash them

With perfume made of whiskey

And all the promises I’ve made before breaking them

Aren’t we all bigger on the inside?

Some days, you remind me of a mountain

And that skin of yours

Holds all the paths of creatures I wish I knew the names of

But I am young

And you are as old as the earth

These flaws of mine are only human.

They will tell you that

Your ribs are too large

And your heart beats too loudly

Your hands shake

And your stomach is too small

You have too many feelings and

When you look at people in their eyes you fall in love

This is no fault of yours

Though people may say so.

They will tell you that your spine

Can only hold up your head

Do not believe them

Because it holds up the sky

And when they tell you that your eyes

Consume too much

Know that it is only natural

Your mind is a hungry jackal

And will devour anything that gives rise to feeling

So when the world tells you

That you are only human

Remember that your body holds two hundred and six separate bones

That those bones hold up your body

Stand tall

Because those steps that you’ve walked

Since the first your mother watched with joy

Are the steps we all take

And when you fall

It is only human.

Let me be the first to say

Let me be the first to say the things that really matter

That I promise

To love you so much I will never wear your skin as a coat

Even if I freeze to death

Even if it never gets that cold here anyway

When you pull down into yourself

All the dark things that live underneath your carpet

I will build a fire out of the cedar wood I planted as a child

Knowing then that one day it would make

Something beautiful

When you push away, saying you need space

I will give you a galaxy

And I will string together a rope made of constellations

So that when you are ready

You can find your way back to me

And when you say that my hands are old

It is because they have seen so much

They have been holding onto time since the thought of you entered the universe’s mind

I became a burning sphere of hydrogen and helium

Because I never want you to live in a world that’s cold.

s q u i d l i n g

Flesh. Bone. Ash.

My mother looks at me

She says that I have gotten skinny

That I am flesh and bone

I am flesh and bone

With a heart shaped like a heart and hands that never stop shaking

I love too much, she says

And one day I’ll give too much of myself away with it.

I peel a tangelo with my hands

Stripping back the skin like it’s a waning moon

And I am the sun

My fingers dry everything and become sticky

Picking up the ash falling from my eyes

Today, they are a burning forest

A green burnt and licked with flames

They consume everything.

Now this is the part where I strip backwards.

I undo my lungs

Unbutton my spine

Unlace these fingertips

I pull myself apart

Scattering the pieces of me in all the places that mattered

Hoping that it will give me meaning

Sometimes, you’ve just got to give yourself to the things you believe in.

Want.

I wanted to be significant

I wanted to be the impossible girl in a room full of languages

The hero and the madman possessed,

Both who dream of something more

I wanted to be the sky falling and the running around trying to save it

I wanted my words to set the sky alight and the sea boiling

Instead,

I am an old man

Wringing my hands and dreaming

About the days when everything was possible

And these hands could hold onto anything.

And those hands of yours

I feel like they could pull me deep into the ocean

Most days I wouldn’t even mind

But would find my place among the fishes

Building with coral and weeds until I made us a home.

When you’re around, I want to tell you how all those past lives of mine shout

With the joy of a thousand children given balloons

But each time I refrain, knowing it would hold too much

And your hands are too small

And too far away

And I have become too much of a coward

Somewhere, I think, between my eleventh birthday and the three quarters that followed

I learned what it meant to grow up

About mistakes and redemption

And how much it hurt

To want to be wanted

Instead, I turn and fall and die

And it is all just a dream

But I wake up each time

With a beating heart and my lungs on fire and I wonder
If you can feel it:

How much I want to be wanted.