That afternoon
On the fifth floor
When I forgot what it 
Meant to be
Afraid,
And you let me see
What you had spent
Your entire life
Trying to hide from the 
World,
I wept with your tears
As if I had always been
Inside of you,
Tucked away
In a space
That even you could not
Destroy.
For yes,
Despite my belief in the 
Search,
And the courageously laid 
Out
Plan,
There would be no finding what could never be lost
Only a revealing 
Of the love
You had saved
For me

I walked miles around
Writer's block
Only to find myself
Surrounded by the 
Swooners
Who waxed poetic 
Lost to the truth
That there were already
3 words to say
I love you

One day
I started practicing 
medicine
As if I were writing a poem.
Deliberately empty
I was listening to the soft,
small voice
asking to find a way home in
this vast, hard world. 
Listening to the story,
revealing.
as if eery syllable
was the last breath
of God
I forgot I was human
and brought forth what
could
and couldn't
be me.
For what really are
symptoms
and poems
but reasons to become
silent
and speak what can't be
said
​with words.

I watched her for nights,
glowing. 
The overhead lights 
pretending to be her moon.
Sometimes I lost her in the 
dark
as I went chasing after her
fingers
dancing themselves to the
beat of some other mystery.
She told me It didn't turn out 
right, the colors and the 
shades.
The channel broken
somewhere along the way as 
she sipped her evening tea.
Hardly able to read my own 
handwriting, I sat
dumbfounded by what had 
manifested on the page.
I had never seen something
so beautiful,
yet so broken,
so miraculous
Yet so human
Where in this hauntingly
disastrous world had she 
gone to bring back the sky
that had been painted 
between the trees by a 
creator weeping in joy
knowing that one day a 
daughter would wake
and bring to life
what could never be born. 

Love starts hard
Then it gets harder.
At some point it becomes
Impossible
And in the moment you sever your 
Ties with love
To be free of what is no longer 
Attainable,
You will be filled up
Like an overflowing pot of tea
Steaming
Steeping
Seething at the thought
That the only way you can be 
Poured back into the world
To be sipped 
To be saved
To be savored
Is to find the cups
That once were pots
And share what came
​From Me.

In stillness
I pondered
from what storm
had you emerged?

Your crystalline face
a reminder of
what can be made
when struggle falls in love
with hope,
when pain loses itself
in possibility,
when brokenness wraps its arms
around itself.

Staring through my
nakedness
you saw what could never
be clothed,
what I had never been willing to
undress.

Your love was relentless
scooping up the buried pieces
broken in my fight
to defy essential wholeness
and the heart
it was made to win.

In my world
I wake up into dreams
And fall asleep into reality
I love what I can see
And am loved by what I can’t

In my world
I am undone by the Irrefutable
And am made whole by the Indescribable
I am what is inconceivable
Yet conceive what is
Unbelievable

In my world
I speak by becoming silent
And listen by talking to the heart
I pray by forgetting I'm praying
And remember we shall never be apart

You know when you’ve read a poem
Not by its questionable rhyme
Nor its disdain for punctuation
And complete disregard for time

Not by its love for the ordinary
Nor its refusal to stay on the page
Not by its willingness to hold you
While you break free from Maya’s cage

Not by its rare discernment
Nor its way for making you think
Not by its need to meet you
While your soul steps out to drink

You know when you've read a poem
When you have no wish to speak
For the words that came upon you
Said what your heart told you last week