Yesterday was a day to be soft
Be broken and be heard
Be calm and be reborn into consciousness.
Today is a day to be angry
Expose injustices, bloody untruths
And spit venom in the face of fear.
Tomorrow will be time to rebuild
Each and every institution that has fallen
For what can newly nurture.
When I say you’re perfect
I mean it from the whole of my essence
From my tingling toes
To each breath I excitedly (and deeply) inhale,
From my deepest lost fantasy
To each lightly placed finger tip
That crawls every imagination I’ve got.
Your perfection seeds my stillness
That captures me in your grace.
Your wrong is not a wrong,
Your wrong is effort in my eyes
That nurtures your blossom,
Imagination takes your fancy
And lifts your spirit,
Infecting me like a perfect vision,
A serpent,
A sun rising from the horizon
Inch by inch warming my open eyes
To the miracle of a new day.
Your perfection isn’t in your perfect action,
Or your perfect features,
Or your perfect voice or perfect success,
Your perfection lies within your being.
Your perfection lies within your effort
That dances as you know how to dance
Over obstacles and through conversations,
That listens and speaks and shares and fights
And bruises and hurts and feels and bites.
Perfection is you, not the sum of your doings,
It stays with you as you go,
And returns again tomorrow,
It follows you into your messiest of days
And shadows you as you run.
When I say that you’re perfect,
It doesn’t hinge on how you treat me
Or what you bring me as a gift,
It doesn’t depend on your generosity
Or how close you hold my hand,
No, I mean it without you even knowing me
And I mean it as you walk upon your path,
I mean it as you say goodbye
And wave me our last kiss.
Sweet dirt, my soil;
Great bounty of life.
Breathing and heaving and turning delight.
You break down my blossoms
And decompose your own waste
To help nurture all life
Balanced, and full of bugs and worms.
Your kindness is forgiving,
Your consistency is staggering,
Your patience is humbling,
Your vitality encouraging.
Even your air is enlivening –
Quite literally in fact.
And if until forever I had
Betwixt my fingernails and toes
Your rich presence to look at
Your heart in my hand,
I’d forever be full
Of everything I’d ever need
Until the day at last did come
For me to join thee, forever free.
From this ledge I looked out beyond,
I surveyed the stillness.
Waiting,
Expecting,
Un-avoiding brief glimpses
Of society’s marks;
Transport trucks rumbling
In and out of earshot.
From this ledge I held onto a hand,
I held on so tight to remind me
That in spite surmountable distances,
In spite out-of-control conveniences
I wasn’t alone here;
Alone in my thoughts.
This wasn’t my diary,
This was my acceptance refusal.
From this ledge I plotted.
I took every hemlock and spruce
Inside my heart and nurtured their spirit
To grow with me as I carved my initials
Into their supple skin, raw so real;
Nature entwined my soul and became me
And I became it.
And I lept from this ledge with eyes wide open.
Give me memories that make me wish I wasn’t so far away
Swallow my soul into a bottle of translucent liquid marked fun
Crave something for which spaces only nurture
For which less distance can only satisfy
Purge my soul of all its desires that land on the outside
Make it swallow with those still in your nose kind of feelings
Make it curl toes and wrinkle backs into silent signs of joy
And send letters when the words escape you