Thursday, January 21, 2016

i don't want to love you like this {poem}
























I don't want to love you like this.

I don't want to play games with sensuality,
lingering too long with every touch,
aware of the power in my fingertips
as they trace your skin
beneath your clothing-
knowing I could remove them all with this one coy finger.

I don't want to look for answers in how your body
embraces mine,
translate your sighs as promises
you never meant to keep.
It is so very convincing, you leaning into me
and perhaps if I lean back
you'll believe in this surface love of mine.

A love that would rather feel your arms
than hear your words.
That wants to kiss your lips to stop
you from asking questions.
Stop checking in with me and press into me--
that way I can choose what I want to hear
through what I feel.

That way I can continue to be deceived
by this thing I call love.
If ignorance is bliss than
I am strung out on lust,
high off an idea
that the longer you hold me
the longer I can hide.

But you see me.
You see that I am afraid
not of loving you
but what it might mean to let you love me.
What I might have to give.
--give up--
What I would have to share with you
for you to truly see me.
Oh the weight of my heart is so much heavier
than your entire body on mine.

I don't want to love you easy,
I want a much more fragile nakedness.
I want more than just to want you,
I want to know you.
I want to be more distracted by your
integrity than I am by
how I know you will feel;
to see your thoughts as response
to your heart.
To let you see all that you cannot touch
and touch so sweetly
all that you cannot see.
Yes--
I want to love you in ways
I don't yet know how.



As published on Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/01/i-want-to-love-you-poem/

i am committed to you {poem}






















I am committed to you.

God, just the thought of that
used to terrify me--
bind me in breathlessness
strangling any amount of
freedom my heart
thought it would lose
in loving only you.

Young, ignorant heart.
It knew not the vastness,
the immense capacity it has
to love--
that to give it to you
was not a limitation at all
but the purest release into loving.

It feared what it might miss out on,
who else's heart might match
its rhythm; who else's love
could seep into the contours
of its wounds--
unhealed scars from battling
Love itself.

But it is ready now.
More patient.
Reactions swell like
rich ocean waves
only to crash and collect
themselves
back into the sea.
My heart now knows
the pattern of passing fear
and remains free; unarmed.

Oh what freedom there is in
love, knowing now
it needs nothing in return,
is bound only be its own intentional
propensity to feel.
This heart is committed to you
without expectation,
without conditions.
It knows that your love
is not the same as its own,
and does not search yours
to lend it purpose.

My heart is committed to you
in its honest,
sweetly simple
commitment to love itself.



As published on Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/01/committed-to-love-poem/

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Hold me {poem}





















Hold me.
Wrap your thick,
capable arms around me
and without words 
ask me not to leave.
Gather me in you
to remember how safe it is here.
Warm.
A fire prepared to combust at the whisper
of breathe into a 
neglected contour of skin. 


Hold my gaze
and you'll see even more to feel;
flickering specs of affirmation.
I see you.
See me.
Look for what you know
yet stay intimately curious
at all that unravels in
tender observation.


Hold space for me.
Let me react. 
Let me thrash with passion and 
cry with want--
softened by your patience
as I try to move from my mind to my heart
and trust that there is no rush
in loving you.


Hold back,
just for a moment.
Collect all that you touch
all that you see
and all that you can admit to want.
Sit with it.
Be provoked.
Be called to feel.
As I learn how to love you,
learn how to receive it.
Take in love not as you
know it to be,
but as it is for us.
And fearlessly hold more tightly
to it.




As published on Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/01/hold-me-poem/



Thursday, January 7, 2016

My worth {poem}





















To you I sway like sweet waves of honey,
and though the way my hips move to unheard music has you hypnotized,
there’s more to me than curves to trace with your hands.


My value isn’t in the skin underneath your fingertips as you reach out to touch what tempts you.
Lingering there will not collect my worth, and you cannot kiss me enough to make it known to me.

I do not find value in your arms,
comfort, yes,
arousal
yesss
oh yes
but my space in your bed is not my worth.

Nor is my space in your heart.

Love me.
Please do.
Love me for my body
and the way it fits in the grooves of yours and the way we glide together into each parcel of space.
Love me for the familiar scent of my
skin when you
close in on my neck.

Love me for the heart that
is pressed to yours
and the love you know it has for you—
not because I have told you
but from the undeniable richness of
our colliding energy,
the way your bones know the elixir
of their own marrow.

Love that it is safe here
in Us
and our unwavering honesty—
never has anything we cannot see
or touch
been so true.

Love me for the way I tease your mind
with my thoughts,
and how our dueling perspectives
amplify our senses.

But know that no amount of
attraction will detail my worth.

That while you place value on me,
and I on you
this love is not an exchange.
I do not give you my body,
touch my lips to yours,
feel my bones quake
because to be held by you
makes me worth something.
Your approval
is flattering and
your agreement
fiercely connecting
but I am not validated by it.

I am worth just as much with any of that as with nothing at all;

you see,
my value,
is in my Self
and the purity of my being alive at all—just as yours
should be to you.



As published by Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/01/my-value-is-not-in-my-body-poem/

She was free {poem}





















I knew her before what she called
Love, was lost.

Before the paradigm shattered
and with it
all that seemed to matter to her.

Who was that girl?

A freedom being,
genius in essence;
uncompromisingly her.

She moved with light steps
on quicksand
sinking not an inch
in who and how to be
instead a tease for Temptation itself;
a Wanderess who followed not
and lead without calling.

She led those drawn to her
simply,
the way a patch of grass
begs one to lay and look at the stars
and be peaceful in knowing nothing.

She had no need to know—
the embodiment of trust
whose laugh cast doubt to the wind,
a heart impenetrable by fear.

She was not afraid of Love,
rather marvelled at its unfolding,
immediate in her response,
insatiable in her giving.

She was not concerned with time,
nor a victim to vicious control,
she was at ease learning—
curious yet wise,
a collector of lessons
and a creator of adventures.

She was fascinated by Life
and lived to feel and be,
to see and be seen.

She did not see it coming:
expectation stole
her from presence
and fear settled in, replacing love,
repressing. Taming.

That girl is me:

a woman fiercely piecing herself together,
remembering myself,
unstrangling her heart,
expanding in capacity for and relearning to trust in Love,

willing,

capable,

in full belief that while we lose ourselves
at times in Love,

we find it, truer still, within
—and are set free again.








Move slowly {poem}




Move slowly.


Don’t speak.
Close your lips unless to kiss his;
don’t ask him where this is going
or want beyond this night.

Be present.
Unfurl your fingers and
clasp his head in your hands
and lean in.

Lean in, deep into now.
Right here.
Let his hands slip to your back
and be caressed by the magnetic pull
connecting you to him.

Do not taint this intimacy
with hazy ideas of what a moment might amount to—
where is the value in that?

You dilute his desire for you
in questions of what is next.
Ask instead: what do you have to give?
Everything.

Every detail of every feeling
that has you perched on your toes
weightless to this moment—
because the next is not yours to know.

What plan?
Your heart’s pace doesn’t quicken for the future
but for now;
Love does not follow a time line.

And passion dances erratically,
without a pattern to step to.
Step into it.
Let the immediate entanglement with love
captivate you.

Let it have you.
Allow your need to know to
collide with your doubts and disintegrate
—dustlike—
so that your immediate truths might
light like kindling
and enrobe you in the heat of the moment
as they say.

They who know that Love is not an
exchange, that expecting more than now
thins the path of possibility.

Walk that path with ease,
let him take your hand and wander,

slowly,

present,

with your heart as your guide
and your mind fascinated
at the unfolding of your Love story.





As published on Elephant Journal http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/01/love-him-now-poem/

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Somebody that I used to know

"excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis" --Jeff Brown


I am notoriously excessive. If i am going to have a bite of cake i am going to have four pieces of cake. If i am going for a bike ride just to ride, its three and half hours one way. Spending money usually happens in sprees, "napping" happens in 18 hour blocks, and the length of my holidays has increased with each trip to the point where i am moving temporarily to a country with a language i don't speak where i don't just eat a smear of lemon curd on toast, i just eat the whole jar of curd--uncomfortably true story…. Excessive in the form of gluttony and impulse, but also in passion, dedication, discipline, and--for the purposes of this post--love.

Any amount of excessive love i feel is of course, not as unhealthy as a whole jar of yolky-sugary-curd, quite the opposite. Love can set you free from the other excesses that stem from an insatiable desire to feel that same adrenaline, connection, elation that love offers. Love is not stoic, it is not cool, and though it is contented and trusting and at its truest at ease in the giving and receiving without keeping tabs on the exchange. It is abundant, limitless, a contagion that spreads like wild fire wherever kindling lies--and i would argue that most of our hearts are stocked with burnable, light-up-able bits. Yes love can be freeing, and oh how it once was for me.

Once? Once. I wish i could pinpoint the moment when it stopped being, when the freest part of my being became the most strangled. When i became doubtful if not afraid of love.

Perhaps when i realized the immensity of its power.

Perhaps when i thought i knew what it was and that paradigm was reconfigured.

Perhaps when it wasn't accepted in its purest form, but questioned.

Perhaps i spend too much time questioning it myself.

All i know is that this is not me. The someone that i used to know was not afraid of love, or much else for that matter. All i know is that i am now consumed by an insatiable need to know and it is tainting my experience of love. My greatest excess now is in analyzing every action i make from or toward love; every thought too, questioning which are the truest and which are the most riddled with fear and desire for something tangible. God Damn! The most beautiful parts of love are the unpredictable, catch-your-whole-being-off-guard intimate details--not to be confused with romance, but instead what that is inspired by. Lately i try far to hard to act as an enabler of Love, and it is unto nothing at all--because you can't be! You cannot create love, you have to access it from a pure heartspace and a genuine essence of self--and you taint it when you try. And though i know this, and once never tried to play with it, my mind is inhibiting the connected power of my heart. And when my mind is such a littered mess of confusion, desperately needing to control, hypothetically analyzing and reading too much into an unwritten love story, i read into something more real. I meditate. I write.

And then i eat an excessive amount of anything, as always, with a soundtrack.

(the read):

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/12/how-to-stop-polluting-our-relationships/


(the moving meditation):























(the writing):

I knew her before what she called
Love, was lost.
Before the paradigm shattered
and with it
all that seemed to matter to her.

Who was that girl?

A freedom being,
genius in essence;
uncompromisingly her.

She moved with light steps
on quicksand
sinking not an inch
in who and how to be
instead a tease for Temptation itself;
a Wanderess who followed not
and lead without calling.

She led those drawn to her
simplicity,
the way a patch of grass
begs one to lay and look at the stars
and be peaceful in knowing nothing.

She had no need to know--
the embodiment of trust
whose laugh cast doubt to the wind,
a heart impenetrable by fear.

She was not afraid of Love,
rather marvelled at its unfolding,
immediate in her response,
insatiable in her giving.

She was not concerned with time,
nor a victim to vicious control,
she was at ease learning--
curious yet wise,
a collector of lessons
and a creator of adventures.

She was fascinated by Life
and lived to feel and be,
to see and be seen.

She did not see it coming:
expectation steal
her from presence
and fear settle in, replacing love,
repressing. Taming.

That girl is me:
a woman fiercely piecing herself together;
remembering myself,
unstrangling my heart,
expanding in capacity for and relearning to trust in Love,
willing,
capable,
in full belief that while we lose ourselves
at times in Love,
we find it, truer still, within
--and are set free again.


(the eating):


















(the song--and not the one used as a title…):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmdPKfzZMSg


And the point of all of this is that i want you and i and all the wild fire hearts to love freely. Everything and everyone and when you venture from love to in love do not do it encumbered with expectations and sick with fear. Do it with a willingness to experience every feel in life. Do it because your heart has something to say and to not is to strangle it. Love is a choice that cannot be made for you, or manipulate to fit your mind's ideals. Do not get so fixated on an imagined relationship that you do not even see the unique and immeasurable real person there for you in the only ways their love knows how to be. Do let its potency enrich your vulnerability and trust with the utmost fervour and vibrancy. Do not lose yourself in love, because that Self is all the love --the sustainable, unique expression of it-- you have to offer. Do touch skin, touch thoughts, touch souls; leave a trail of love where you go. Love is not to be taken in moderation, but to pour out in downright excessive abundance.

xx