Unconditional

Full disclosure, this is not some rain-soaked love poem penned by the frozen fingers of some civil war veteran in 1867, letter carried by postman on horseback seven hundred miles in the snow so his lover would read it and know just how much the photo of her sun-soaked smile folded in his wallet propels him forward one foot in front of the other through every mud-covered mile of this blood-soaked death patrol. How she sparks hope like fire from a gas leak in a rainstorm. 

This is not that poem, I've already told you exactly how high I built your pedestal, how rosy red you turn the lens I see the world through, but you were allergic to that flowery bullshit so we put on our garden gloves and pulled those weeds out. We worked through it. Our friendship is a big slab of concrete that snaps every pickaxe I slap against it. I wanted to crack it open and find the gold they wrote about in those old love poems. But I found something better, the most valuable matter ever whispered about in the haunted taverns' gossip circles of long dead treasure hunters. I would trade no other brand of union for this slab of concrete friendship, I am so thankful for what we have. 

But it's like this blanket of moss keeps growing on top of it. Not much, I can always scrape it off later, it's just a thin little layer. I stapled on it a reminder not to water it with overthinking or expectations. It doesn't change what we are, it just adds some flavor. I love you as a friend, and also more than that. 

And maybe that's just a challenge to the way society attempts to make us limit and compartmentalize the types of affection we can have for each other so that we can only feel one type of love for our friends, and another for our family, for lovers, for teachers, for monarchs. But you are so many things to me all at once. You're a role model and a fairy god-mother and my queen. Serving you is my favorite thing, my greatest pleasure, it illuminates every node on the spectrum of my emotions and compels every kernel of my being. And still, you're more.

You're a healing light, helping me pull from the shadows of my psyche every wounded piece and hold it tight. You don't just make me feel safe, my love for you is a place where my soul can take refuge. You heal the pain from every bad thing that ever happened to me by the simple fact that it all led me to you. And still, you're more.

You teach me nothing short of unconditional love, not just for you, but for myself, because if I can love you despite the fact that you don't feel exactly the way I wish you did, then I can also love myself despite not being exactly what I wish I were. And as I learn to accept our relationship for what it is, rather than comparing it, I also learn to accept myself as I am. 

I don't think you're my soulmate, I think you're just so spectacular that I don't need one. I get everything I want just from wanting. I don't love you for what you mean to me, what you could give me, what you represent, no. I love you because you are so undeniably lovable. I used to think it was a bad thing I couldn't turn off these feelings. Try as I might, the pining of my heart will never stop. But I'm starting to see the benefit of feeling such solid consistency. It's not a place where I hold out for hope that one day you'll realize you love me just as much. I'm not that kind of masochist. By contrast, I love myself so much that I don't need to dole out my love only in places where it will be neatly reciprocated in exactly the same flavor and shape. Any pain I feel is a reminder to weed out those expectations.  My self-worth does not depend on you, rather I love you because I'm worth too much and I worked too hard not to enjoy happiness in whatever form it chooses to arrive. It is not hope for more that keeps my next foot in front of the other on this brief, exhausting, chaotic journey. It's not a journey at all when I think of you. There's no where else I need to go. My love is a dance floor.

To climb

Your walls, so tall
Stretched high above the fog
My eyes squint tight
I hold my knots
My nose leaks snot
Still I can't spot the top
I know it not
If this gold I want
This goal I sought
Is real
Still it's worth it just to fail
Even if each pull and tug and heave
Each cold breath of air I wheeze
is futile
A voyage to a door that's closed and locked
Still it's worth it just to knock
To climb, to try
To test my self against that open sky
To grasp for love, to close my eyes
And dream of reaching your last block
To crack your walls
And vanquish them
Replace them as your safe haven
And maybe such a dream could never happen
Still it's worth it just to fall
And let my body decorate the bottom
A tribute to my passion
So others could see something great awaits
On the other side

Like television

The first time I found Jesus he was strung up on a fence post, his arms stretched out and stapled to the rails, belly stuffed full of straw, a scare crow god there to scare off death, monsters, outlaws and the unknown, my rubber turkey deity on a cross to comfort me with the promise that I could take that casket doorway to his place with the other zombies, I just have to be a good person, which is simple because right and wrong is simple. Just do what it says in the book besides this part. Don't overthink it. Just watch television. It'll teach you how the world works, there may be some growing pains when you actually experience it. But I have no regrets.

I promise you mother. I'm so sorry I ran away. I just couldn't live without reminders that you love me. I thought about what mothers did on television, the way they loved their kids, I saw my friends with mothers who would talk to them, and suddenly I wish I knew about my grandparents. All I remember about them is that I grew up going to funerals. On my birthday I always wore the same exact Peter Pan outfit and then lay awake at night wondering if it was really true that one day we all grew old and died.

The second time I found Jesus, she was staring back at me through my captive reflection painted on the iridescent gasoline sheen from a glossy silver 30-gram brick of cannabis hash oil bought from a man in a tinfoil hat to wax the bored look off my face. Lubed up to ride forty days and nights on a desert highway performing the gas-jug asphalt American ceremony of anointed gutter-punk garbage messiah kings raging for a different kind of machine. And as I peaked I noticed not one set of blotter prints behind me but two.

I knew I was different. I can't sit still. I must discover, create, explore, make an impact on this world not to find meaning but to hide myself from the lack of it. I keep trying to hide from mortality by making my life as rich and full of love as possible but it all goes to the same place. Behind me. Each breath in and out of my lungs is its own last one but knowing that fact doesn't help me repeat them. I can't even remember my dreams, how am I supposed to remember this life, this place, all of you, when it's over? I try to keep moving forward but I'm still just out-stretched and holding on to the rails. I still wish things were different. I still need to forgive someone. I still need to apologize for failing to save the world, I could have done something, I was different. I still need to apologize to my mother.

I'm so sorry I forgot my temper. Nerves dripped discomfort, my skin went goosebumps and burnt hot by embers, mouth scowling warning growls. I can't sit still. I bit and snapped until control came back but by then I was bitten and leaking puddles of regret and wondering how could I say that to my mother? I didn't mean to. But the fact is every interaction orbits the weather, or what somebody said the other day. I talk about my dreams and you talk about acting classes. And I realize then that we are from far-away planets. I never feel connected. It's like you're never present, and there's always this tension. I can't go without reminders that I'm held and loved, so I'll settle for forgiveness. I'll set to prove you love me one way or another. I'll force you to choose from the worst side of me and nothing.

The third time I found Jesus, he was strung-out on a cross-fade of drugs, arms stretched out to embrace his dog as he delivered his sermon to the condemned office building giving him shelter while the rain poured buckets. Wrapped in a coincidence blanket, magic crystals hanging from his neck, gnostic symbols tattooed to his face. In his mouth, a cigarette he had pulled off the ground, and he offered me a drag. He called it sacred tobacco to exorcise my demons.

He said the secret was to smile. People like smiles. He said I had two lions, their names good and evil, problem and opportunity, complaint and compliment. Their names are shame and gratefulness, faith and fearfulness, Scar and Mufasa, stories and memories about me that live on in others after I die, and I chose which. But he wasn't finished. He told me the worst side of you is not that evil-looking scar you hide from the world in shame and fear, it's the coward that hides it. Forget dying, that's how you are annihilated. I'm so sorry, my mother, that I never listened. Please tell me about my grandparents. It doesn't have to be like television.