Sunday, August 4, 2013

Rough Draft for Paul

Hey, Paul.
Tell me what it’s like to be a house.
To have a ten bedroom heart,
ten beds per room,
room for all, tell me what it’s like
to be a hallway
lined with couches, hung
with art, a kitchen
with food for days, we’re talking
good, local, farmer’s market cheese and bread
beets like garnets and snapping peas,
tell me please, what it’s like
to wear a wraparound porch smile
on your face every day.
While others wear masks you use joy
like the lightest of make-ups, just a little
brush here and there, rubbing off
on all your kisses, like whitewashing
your picket fence, your fence with no gate
so it can never, ever be closed.

Tell me what it’s like to be water.
To be fluid and unabashedly changing,
to be change as a constant, to be constant
as an ocean, to be really
worth your salt, to exist in all places at once
in all your states, to be the color of truth,
not of sadness but still to be there
when we cry, to give birth
to everyone you love.

Tell me what it’s like to be naked:
no costumes, no barriers,
no defenses, no lies, to be bare,
to be open, an unpainted house,
water in its vapor state, unadorned,
revealing and revealed, to exist
in your most pure form, to be free
to dance on a rooftop at sunset,
to be truthful,
truly, tell me

so I can learn to be that, too.

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