To All of Us

this is to climb a staircase to a room of sleeping loved ones,
to find a dream catcher

wriggling with strangled life

visions tangled in the lattice

this is for the clipping
let the leather dangle, dead and maimed

you, also, have wanted to rid your ankles of these laces

we're not nightmares
just places imagined and let go
from somewhere inside our most-loved
as they slumber

we are the heaviest of dreams

not wanting flight, so much as community

and we worship the handiwork of the ones awake when we're not

smile at the glean of their blades

snip, shear, and untangle what we don't realize

is coming unconscious from us

the sights we spin and free

and send to those lying nearest

this is to know rapids closely

lick the stones buried in white water

and ask them why they're anxious

not to stop

just to know, if their restlessness and yours, is the same

i found a friend climbing billboards

this is to climb with him

to hold his bucket of paint

as he alters the wants of the world

he turned to me there

our thousandth work

and said, "again and again

this is to catching tomorrow,"

and he lept on a passing car

to which I followed

we held its mane tight,

and night came, lovely cold, and rushing

after the hundreds,

who couldn't even name the weight,

this is to the hands that lift it from our chests,

these are fingers on a breast

the heavy grace of caligraphers that drag their tools so lightly

leaving love for our bodies to breathe against and learn,

"what did you write, oh friend,

what love have you written here?!"

this is to the learning

to the recreation stories

being scribbled between our ribs

to not throwing away stained shirts

and thanks that really come from grace

to living in the spaces between perfection

this is to lips and teeth turned to red wine

on account of days saved thinking

when there lives no heir to an emptied throne

and its on us to make a nation new

even one fortune finally not left to lottery

to give our soldiers rest

and new language for us all

i may be a silent idiot

but im no longer a sewer of idiom

this is to lifting my beer in the quiet

this is to the thermostat in your belly

the one that warns you of a loneliness that's making you cold

it is the eye which spies frost creeping the curve of your heart

hears an unwelcome december gale

whistling in your chest bones

and it speaks to me

this is to its defensive proclamation

give us music, give us message, give us warmth

it says

here's to it always morphing voice, keeping us alive

to the ones who've always assumed

everybody's homesickness is the churning

of an anxious angry stomach

at the thought of what happens in their house

this is to realizing what people actually mean

this is to the ones who can only look to the fog

hung on those mountains

to be called home

this is to making reasons to be homesick

when our ship pitches to starboard

and again no land, no light

this is to toasting the storm

smiling fools roaring back at the thunder

lost at sea

this is to the pictures we've spread on the deck

thousands on the wood planks

love these ones not with us

frame your face in my hands

and kiss you hard

provoke the storm

remove your shirt and stare down the sky

"you can do much

can you do this"

i get it when you say you want out of your clothes

out of your skin

this is to the music, the beer, the people

ready to strip you bare

when it used to be just me

and then all of you too

this is to all the ways of us

its faces and voice

this is to all the sacred places

that we will build with dirty hands