Words

What are words anyways ?

Are they but cups in which we attempt to serve others the ocean?

Are they open boxes that we foolishly fill with butterflies?

As we try to define moving, rushing, rivers with the scoop of a bowl

So it can fit in our hands,

one palm-full at a time

The very act of containing

muffles the raging life that once swirled within

Proves there is not enough evidence in our hands to understand

For the cup offered will taste like salty water

and our boxes will quickly be empty with a fleeting flutter

and the river will be only a still puddle

in the effort to pass her to you

Contained

in each one of these symbolic characters lays the smaller pieces of something so much more

deeper than six letters can ever go

six letters that are merely tips of ice burgs to negotiate around

Still, we search for all the right ones

pour mountains of salt in undersized containers to hand over the table

leaving piles upon our laps to pickle our skin

With the missing moisture we go ahead

color a picture of heaven with our box of 72 crayons

but I hope you don’t believe that heaven can be recreated with 72 crayons

or that every sentence we count in our heads

dials the same phone number

In fact, they’re listening to you right now

Wondering what you meant by that violet blue and sienna brown you decided to use

in your venture to cram every texture and dimension

every emotion, sight, sound, and smell

every memory and well within you

into the 5 minutes they had to listen

and the 38 lines you decided to say

And all I can do is laugh

at my own futile attempts

to squeeze the deluged into a cup.

Tangled Up

You walk into the shower and close the door
Letting out all the man that you've become
And I lay in my bed listening unlike before
to the water splashing to come.
Your body seems much firmer now,
your lips so soft and inviting
The calls and proposals I once left ignored
are beginning to get life exciting
And why so suddenly does it all seem so?
Is it the fire ignited in you to reinvent your passions?
Or maybe I simply do not know...
can only guess the persistent, loving gaze has toppled my wallish fashions
Unwavering
has gently urged me to listen with different ears and look with open eyes
these days
I see the man that's always been inside
And I take back everything I've ever said
and how I tied rocks to your name
for it was a little girl who would not forget a little boy in her head
and lost a love in vain
Now, I listen to the water and you
not so far away
inspiring dangerous tossing of cautions to the wind
imagining the delicious depths of where you can play
all the while questioning the friends
that I hope we stay.

The Funeral

Once there was a little girl who was not afraid of death. Then she went to a funeral.
She had been to funerals before. Even stared down into the closed eyes of those shells left behind with an almost morbid yet numb disconnect. She watched the mourners and only cried a tear or two empathizing with the pain of those who hurt because they lost another.
But then came this funeral. The funeral of a woman who once held her hand when she was only a little girl. She sat in the back row as countless others who had also been touched by this woman stood and told stories of the life lived before the crowd. The girl, now much older then when the woman had first held her hand, could not stop thinking. First were the memories they had shared, memories she was too cowardly to confess in front of all the watery eyes. The girl remembered how the woman would teach her to make paper-bag puppets and hand her Hansen's Mandarin sodas on hot, sunny days. She remembered that she once was a little girl, a time that now seemed so far away.

Then a speaker addressed the crowd and said this:
"What we say, what we do, and who we are will affect people in ways we will never know, like our shadow that stretches past ourselves and goes places we may actually never go."

The girl couldn't stop thinking about her own shadow, where it was stretching and if it was even there at all. The girl wondered if her friends would sing at her funeral...if she would be so fondly remembered. The girl did not go to the opened casket to see the empty shell and instead chose to remember the woman good and standing tall, laughing in unison with her child-self as they both made paper-bag puppets. The girl couldn't stop crying, even after she returned home, wondering about her own life and what she would leave behind. And for the first time, the girl truly understood the value a death gives to life.