Are You There, God? It's Me, Phoenix.

I am a pencil sketch of the self-portrait Michelangelo hid beneath his tongue

The kind of art the artist knows the world will never love

but creates in spite of the waves

that will inevitably engulf him

Tsunami-tinged passion

I am the natural disaster

America’s Oedipus eyes could never see

But blamed for their blindness

Katrina hope rising from the dissolution of human kindness

I am everything you’ve never had the capacity to say

The words whose linguistics escaped a language-locked state

As accidental as the collision of atoms and faith that brought you into existence

I am humanity’s reflection in the sky

In a world where our greatest fear

Is becoming all that we are meant to be

 I’ve come to realize that hating ourselves has become a fashion

That the passion with which we chase dreams out of immature mind states

Is our way of coming to terms with self-imposed inevitability

& that the idea of a planet

Coming to terms with his identity as a glorified moonman turned star

Just put the pressure back on

But one day,

The world will ask where I went to

Your children will search the sky for answers.

All I ask is

After the mudslinging

But before the fall

You remind them that I was God once

Hidden in the body of a dog

Projected onto silver screens

To make sense of adolescent divinity

That gravity rolled off my hips

And regardless of the sheet of ice in which I lived

At my core, I was molten-metal human

Taking refuge in the sky

Where avatars threw out their rough drafts

I was garbage can creation

Made to pose for family pictures on a daily basis

The runt of the litter

With numerology on my side

I was passed-off perfection

The product of astronomical erections

And the number 9

But despite all my shortcomings,

Tell them I was love.

Your eyes

are the bluest shade

of human
I have ever seen

and I have never believed in faith at first anything,

but I am entranced by your ocean.

Body buoyant,

my bloodstream bleeds weightless now,

as if the only original sin

humanity was ever guilty of

was allowing its emotions

to surrender to gravity’s pull.

I could never foster peace

between my heart and my tongue.

Butterflies getting stuck

somewhere between

my superego and my esophagus,

I grew up spitting out a million reasons why happiness

wasn’t mean for a heart with so many craters

devoid of any possibility of fostering alien life.

I was a lonely planet

the rotation of lovers around my crooked halo,

a bittersweet exercise in introspection.

My words never thought I was worthy

found too much error I

n the discrepancy between my intentions and the garbled recollections

my nerves construed into confused communications.

We humans are too mechanical

to ever compensate for our lack of intangibility

and our poems are sick of waiting for an explanation

as to our vanished belief in the power of prayer,

regardless of whether we’ve ever seen a church

or learned to recognize the face of God in the lightning.

Our words are waiting to be sonic manifestations of prophecy,

but we are not ready to be the world,

unprepared to accept the future inscribed into the lines of our palms.

Our faces the second coming of grace,

we workshop God each time

we donate breaths to the space between

reason and the unexplained.

Uncertainty is not only our middle name

but the secret to our strength.

I’ve never been so willing to be feeble,

so in love with the color of life.

You make my tongue

want to spit penance

for the insecurity I’ve felt in this skin

to embrace

the vulnerability

inherent in being

human.

You made me believe in the kind of love at first sight

that happens when our eyes

meet our reflections for the first time,

when we first realize we don’t need to apologize

for the din of our heartbeats

& learned to love the entropy-

the universe’s obsession

with becoming as disordered

as the thoughts graffitied onto the walls

of our mindsets.

Our progress has always been analog-

These insufficient arms

the antennas through which our voices have learned to translate the sun.

I have heard that our thoughts

                                                                                                have the potential to knock down                                                                    

                                                            as many walls

                as our fists.

that our cruel intentions can destroy beauty

just as easily  as Shiva’s vengeance

that the extent of our physical bodies pales

in comparison to the strength our souls possess at rest

 and, yes,

we’ve been searching the sky for answers

but maybe the teasing darkness

that dashes in and out of our closets and nightmares and “I love you’s’’ far too much

is just there to remind us

to wish on the endless bursts of light

streaming from our chests

& shine

for this lifetime is a lucid dream

prolonged to remind us of our connection to the divine.

There is no such thing as impossibility

when we are ticking time bombs of ethereal epiphany.

Do not worry if the sound of your voice

does not echo loud enough

to hold your insecurity in its palms,

for vulnerability is sacred

and we often have to become deaf

to  realize how dumb these tongues really are

how naïve these spectres of sound

position themselves with respect

to everything out there

and up there

and in us.

We were made to love blindly, but consciously

To walk with strength in the ruin.

We wear ashes proudly,

for the fire

has only made our glass castles

shine that much brighter

reflect that much more beauty

be more gracious or graceful

for we must not forget to be grateful

to be so full of grace

on a daily basis-

impure

in the sense that

we are progress

rough

in the sense that

we are Pangaea

broken

in the sense that

we are mosaic of humanity and homes

built from the stones

they so loved to throw at us.

We are connection personified-

unified in the belief that we share nothing but everything-

and that nothing less than all of us

will ever be enough.

Settle for nothing less than shine

Give nothing less than completely.

Speak light.

    Illumine vision. See brilliance.

Paint life.

 Breathe change. Live love.

                                                                                     Love hope.

Hope always.

Forever be.

Sometimes,

it is not enough

to save the world.

Sometimes, it is necessary to be completely selfish

To shout epiphanies into vacuums &

walk on water just to prove that we can

Sometimes we need to fuck the world

In all its glory

Until it screams our name

Because it sounds so much more alluring

in the dark

it’s hard to tell the difference between

A poem and a crime scene

Between a scribe

And a woman flirting with the ledges of skyscrapers

Just to seduce gravity

Sometimes we need to save ourselves first

Doppelgang our hearts into talking heads

Whose words can convince us that there’s more to living

Than not being dead

Reverse the curse of our bodies

And return to the Earth in spirit

Chant to skies with no name

just to reclaim our faith in

something bigger than these boxes

We call home

When we need to fall back in love with the sound of our pulse.

This is a love poem to the suicidal tendencies

We’ve been conditioned to call sensibilities

A love letter to myself when my aura’s slit wrists

Stop being content with invisibility

And my inner artist wants a go at carving sculptures of skin and bone

 Because sometimes we need to save ourselves

Prevent our pens from rewriting the fall of man

Into the dialogue of brownstones and broken hearts

City streets and christenings in the water of individuality

We need to forget what it feels like to be an afterthought

Caught somewhere between cerebrums and spines

Stop folding ourselves flat into doormats

For slick shoes to walk in on

We need to stop asking for the things we blame God for

Thirsting in preparation for hell and high water

We need to stop throwing ourselves 

Onto train tracks

Just To test the speed of call and response

I need you to need me

But I need to need my self love

More than your approval

So this is a love letter to the girl you knew before,

The song I’ve been trying to write you ever since the night before you lied

I am not giving up on me

Not choosing between a lackluster reality and the space between dreams

This is just a letter from my heartstrings

To the first fingers who learned how to play them

Thanking you for bringing me back to life and reminding me

That I am music

again

I will sing until I break

Will not pick up the pieces

Tye dye your perspective in the red of my honesty

I will warn you not to wear white around me.

will tell you not to shut the door

Will not look both ways before I cross my own borders

Will let you in white flags and all.

I String hope from my vocal cords until it withers

Into a jet-stream sign language of smoke and desert roses

That helps you face your fear of sound

I will be best friend you ever had in every language where agape is written

If you promise that the road less taken

Will always end

In this spot

In this room

Where a compass rose sits in the palm of a map lacking direction

To anywhere

But the home

I find

In you.