You can walk as far as the map will go. 
You can swim all oceans, seas, and lakes. 
You can drive every winding road, 
Bike each cracked and uneven sidewalk. 

But no matter where you go, 
or how far you run 
I will always 
call your name. 

The child you reared

The straight-A student

The hard worker, the one that gives

The disorganized, happy, childish teen

The one who cares too much

My heart, held by your hands

But, is that what I am?

The kid you met one day

The one that was loud and chaotic

The one not scared to just be

The confident young woman

The one who smiles more than not

My heart, now just catering to your experiences

But, is that what I am?

The squirrel-like child, climbing

The fish-like one in the lake

The one who holds on too tight

The one who clings to traditions

The camp I would call home

My heart, safe and unguarded

But, is that what I am?

The grass-stained pants

The scraped knees

The trinkets and rocks and pressed flowers

The messily scrawled poems

The one who watches every sunset

My heart, resting among the clouds

But, is that what I am?

The ground I walk on

The blood I cough up

The sweet oxygen that fills my lungs

The hands that built me

And the thing that I built

This land’s heart, held in my hands

But, is that what I am?

The blood on my hands 

The guilt in my very being

The one of every demographic that kills

White, straight, cis

The one who just wants to stop all of this

My heart, bleeding for humanity

But, is that what I am?

The falling leaves

The coming snow and harsh winds

The change in the weather before spring starts

The birds returning 

Hope, buried in the ground

My heart, among the stored acorns

But, is that what I am?

My very favorite poem is an inarguably terrible one. I do not know its name and do not care to find out if it has a name. The only way I can find of reading it is in its original Instagram post, typewritten for no real reason on a sheet of creme colored paper, with a black and white photograph and a crystal for that extra touch of performatism. The contents of the poem are nonsensical, and to my knowledge, there is no logical way of understanding the twelve words that make up its length. 

The poem is by the Instagram-based poet (you could not torture the word instapoet out of me), Wider, and reads “And I learned that  / Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s dark.” The obvious confusion comes from the unusual placement of the word even, suggesting that flowers are not usually beautiful, and that their beauty in the dark is a rare exception. “And I learned that / Flowers can be beautiful / Even when it’s dark.” would be a much more reasonable way to write the poem, and would also completely ruin the poem.

The best words to describe the poem with, and the words that I strive most to achieve in my own writing, are ‘superficially beautiful.’ Beautiful words with nothing else to them. The lines  “...Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s Dark” suggest fields of flowers, lonely flowers in potted plants, flowers growing out of cracks in walls, all in the sacred dark, all performing some act forbidden to them called beauty, and performing nothing else but beauty. The flowers are not sending any kind of message or provoking any kind of thought, as are widely and wrongly thought to be the purposes of a poem. The flowers are just being, and being beautiful, and we readers are free to watch them being beautiful, or free to look away.

Then there is the first line, “And I learned that…” suggesting some speaker, a guest in the sacred darkness, observing the flowers in their ritual of forbidden beauty, learning for the first ever time, that Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s dark. We, readers of the poem, have not learned this. We have not seen what the speaker has seen, and so we have no true understanding of what it means for a flower to be beautiful in the dark, however beautiful we might already think flowers to be.

I’m sure by now I seem crazy. What I really mean to get at is that any certain combination of words whose sole ability is to sound beautiful, whose only layer, and therefore whose deepest layer is its surface level elegance, has the unique ability to isolate beauty, and show us what beauty looks like alone, naked, nearly invisible, in the dark.

we're so close. 

I am wrapped in the touch of another 

suspended in a state of contentment

and soft safety. 

the lights in my room are warm

and in the mirror 

I see our reflections;

the stripes on my shirt

and the patterns on your socks 

this is us

bathed in an ethereal glow

in this moment I think of her

young and dazed 

dreaming of a life that was coated in a layer of romance 

like sugar on the rim of a cocktail glass. 

I let myself embrace her,

and all she was.

naive and hopeful 

and 

so 

            so

                          so 

full of love. 

a fairy tale is within reach now

even if it's for just one moment 

for her

I will dare to dive 

deep into the abyss of real love. 

He is heartless, they say.

But why did he give the little girl

A piece of his meager bread?

He is calculating, they say.

But why does he not take advantage 

Of the little girl when he easily can?

He is disloyal, they say.

But why did he stay by the little girl’s side

Even when he had more important things to do?

He is greedy, they say.

But why did he ask for nothing in return

After he helped the little girl so many times?

He is a monster, they say.

But why, then, does kindness show through his cracks?

Why did he pick the kite out of the tree for the little girl?

Why did he waste his medicine to help the deer?

Why did he lend his basket to the villagers,

But never asked for it back?

Stay away from him, they say.

But the little girl doesn’t.

and when the sun lingers on the snow

and the moon instates itself over the dark horizon;

when the trees reach, grasping; when the wind curls in on itself, pleading 

when a raging stream wears at stiff pavement 

the world asks-- “who am I?” 

and it pleads, though the world has never pled before

it lingers, as thunder rolls and and stone walls crumble

just to hear its own voice echoed back; 

for the world has only known its own existence 

and there is no answer to the question but the singularity of everything 

but it raises its voice anyway,

because there was no other thing to do

because even the world is not inevitable. 

Once upon a lonely time

The moon fell in love with the sun

And so you see they were lovers

Once when they were young

But then they grew apart, you see

though their love burned brighter on

They saw each other each dawn and dusk

One moment but never enough

When the sun pulled her cloak away

And the moon cast her veil on the day

Did their eyes meet yet grimly so

Filled with tired, practiced smiles

And so they played this terrible game

Of chase, and tag

Of cat and mouse

And of whispered I love yous

Until one day they saw their chance

And met in the sky for a kiss

And the world–

It called it an eclipse

I just want to do something significant.  I

want to write something that matters, something

that makes a change for the good, but

I also want to just be me: I want to dream

of wearing silk dresses with skirts perfect for twirling,

and I want to admire the stars without ever learning them.

I want to be a poet wearing rings and short hair, but

I also want hair flying in the wind, finally long enough

for the braid crown I've always wanted to have, and

I'm too scared to ever wear more than two rings at a time.

I want to streak pages with words that carry such weight, yet

I only ever am able to scrawl frivolous verses in messy cursive.

I want my poetry to be perfect rhymes and meter, but

I'm too much of a rambler, or maybe I'm just lazy with

a tendency of forgetting what my poem was supposed to be about,

trailing into whatever stream of glittering blue water I

find running before my eyes, across my screen.

I had a plan for what was going to come after this line, but

I have now forgotten any glimmer of organization.

I think this poem was supposed to be about trying to make a difference.

And I really hope I do one day, and

I really hope there is at least one person whose heart

I have helped to heal; I hope the wildflowers in my own

have scattered their seeds into your hope, and

grown into your own dreams.