after yesterday, before tomorrow

after yesterday, before tomorrow

will you tell me something?

the secret to not holding my breath

but breathing in the infinitesimal space between

like the gap of two hands pressed tightly together

always holding a space for

solitude.

I will never make a perfect decision

I will never make a perfect decision

each one tainted with the possibility of the other

infinite impossible collages of the mind

no substance but the cyclical pain of fruitless repetition

at the moment of the jump there is no evidence

no argument that will make you see the bad you 

will sustain for the good you have not yet known, to understand your 

own resilience the truth that comes only with time

nothing but a blind faith

or a shred of

reckless optimism

can save you in that moment

logic futile

only now

the letting go

the trusting that

something will hold you.

tender(ness)

this morning I awake from a dream of you

still dripping from the shower

naked and looking down at me with a tenderness

and the shared secret of that mutual excitement

reflected between us like a prism

and the hope of you 

hands on my arms

and the memory that you

did so

I am beginning to understand I think

the way nothing makes sense

the way we can never see what piece it is

we are holding in our hands

we were not children this was a dream

and I lived it and passed out from it

life is a series of awakening from dreams

and I feel that acutely

I am tender

I am tender to that tenderness

I choose to be free (2)

I choose to be free

It is a difficult decision

My fingers still scrabble at the ledge even as I 

speak these words

going back against my resonant certainty

a betrayal a mixed message a last ditch attempt 

to save myself from drowning but

I choose to be free

to not fight battles I will never win for prizes I 

would never ask for blinded by the sharpness of my own pain

I choose to see that pain and to be free

I choose to rid myself of second chances of second guesses of second thoughts

to know everything I am doing I am doing because I am trying I am trying god am I trying

I choose to know that to love myself for all my destructive tendencies

For all my messiness (sitting at the dining table Sophia says, no one is every too much) maybe

I am too much and even so I choose to love myself even though 

I did not put the smiley face at the end of the text or the exclamation point and maybe it was a form

of withholding or maybe it was (and it was) an act of protection and I choose to love myself in that

protection and not plague myself with doubt for not performing

I choose to love myself even while I hope to be free of that 

To speak my mind in the winding path between appeasing and withholding 

To find the truth

I choose to be free 

even in the process of it

I choose to be free of that which I am holding on to like a life preserver

when it is nothing but a dirty plastic bag

I choose to love myself for holding that dirty plastic bag

for hugging it to my chest, I choose to say, oh baby and I choose to hug myself

to pull myself out of the water

to sit on the edge with my feet in the pool

and to look over the ocean

and to breathe

and to choose

to choose

to goddamn choose

to be 

free.

I choose to be free (1)

we went to buy shirts that were too small

and try on perfumes that we did not like

and we bought nothing, but the glimpse

of a different self in the mirror

walked away with only the heaviness

of the real self, but the thing is

I choose to be free (and I choose

to love the part of me that wants not to let me)

incomple

I never finish things,

it is one thing that I worry about

about myself - the not finishing

the always fixing the anxiety cycles

came later but the principle of the thing

was the fact now that creatively it feels

like I never find the period

today sitting on the toilet

I offered myself a moment of compassion

is life not in itself the greatest creative act

with an ever prolonged

completion

maybe it is just because I have been on instagram

reading poems by someone I went to college with

and feeling jealous that she is becoming somebody and

I sat on a step last night and cried to my mother after I could not

muster up the courage to ask a set hand on a film set how he had gotten

his job, begging the universe for someone to give me a

chance and I was just like the cocaine addicted roommate

my friend told me about who doubted his own potential 

and cursed the success of his friends. except I did not curse the success

of my friends just of the friends of my friends who were never

that nice to me at parties. and now I sit here

writing a poem in the style of theirs which I have never quite liked

for its confessional nature that shoves life's edges at you in your face

edgy in its ugliness and I make it about me even though I know it is not about me

and yet the only way to live life is to think it is about you

and I am an artist and I want to make things and I am a poet and I want meaning

and I am a musician and I want to say things without words and I am human

and I want to be held and to be told I am understood

in my dream 

he admits to being sad

and I reach up

and rub his back

as a fogged up window

the clouding returning

almost instantly

but comfort still

in the motion

the point not 

to make it stop

we reach 

his door and 

we pause

I have not

been in since

I say

the sentence

unfinished and lingering

what do we do

with our sadness?

when I wake up

I am not sad exactly

more burdened

lightly with

the feeling of

knowing

of having

lived.

praise for imperfection

And thank god.

I have found my imperfections again.

And they are what make me human.

And I am so glad

I am human.