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