Beautiful Chaos

Sweet nectar that fills my lungs choking me when I get too excited because soft tissue should be flooded with crimson blood, not sugary water. And when the wind picks up and I bury myself into your collarbone and try to steal your heat, I get brought back to when I would stand in front of an old brick fireplace that always gave me so much warmth and comfort, and just letting the cozy pastel of your personality completely wrap me up and bring me the fire that was missing from my hearth. The nectar in my lungs starts to spout from my mouth and soon I'm pushing off from the clay bottom of a hundred-foot deep puddle and finally I get my head just enough over the surface of the water to take a gulp of air. I feel a hand dragging me down into the depth, but soon that hand turns into a vine that's snaked its way around my ankle, then that plant turns into a fishing line that has caught but one fish. Claw marks, a poison ivy rash that's working its way up my leg, and the painful piercings made of hooks become my tattoos, replacing headstone markings and semicolons and tiny, ink black solar systems (they had already replaced galaxies of freckles that line my body in a mirage of constellations.). Thinking of the stars, I go to lay on the ground and stare but soon become distracted and find myself sleeping under a yellow quilt with small, multicolored patches. Then dreams of a kiss on the head fill my mind. You remember right? The first, the only, kiss that caused this all to happen, that is to blame for the pink in my cheeks that finally returns but only as rose petals and soft lips and kind words. Something about those things twirling through my mind like the ballerina who lives in my feet causing me to dance, reminds me of what caused the disaster of life to become such beautiful chaos. A quick breath, a scared question, an excited answer, a relieved laugh of hope, a night of pain, a morning of disbelief, and days after days of growth and creation, each filled with new art. Imagine if I handed you a paintbrush and let the artist who bangs on the walls of your skull paint all the flowers in the same light that you coruscate. If your brush graced the canvas then there would be a tiny battle being fought on every petal, and wilting would be grasping at their edges but more color would bless their surface than ever seen. When winter came and the flowers disappear, each picked by young girls who give both the blossoms and their tears to young soldiers, all that will end up on hardened church grounds- oh, when Winter's frozen touch filled those gardens, I'd give you my palette filled with burning reds, glowing golds, deep greens, and royal purples, and back would you hand one filled with your pastel personality: cool blues, soothing pinks, mauve & mint, soft periwinkle. When you got around to painting my white sky, I could already tell what color you'd paint it, the prettiest pink you ever did see, that slowly changed to a comforting orange. And where the earth reached up to clasp hands with the heavens, a faint white line would intercede, keeping the two lovers apart. Don't worry, I would walk through with a pencil and every spot that touched the blistering brush dipped in bleach, I would draw small daisies so that despite the sky weeping from the longing of the green grass that would remain untouched, eventually she would look and there would be a bouquet waiting for its placement in a vase. That vase is seen from here as billowing cotton balls that so often shape as bloomed flowers or bouncing bunnies or soaring dragons. And dear, when you've run dry of creativity I'll walk you home and under the light of a flickering street light I'll show you the tattoos of creeping hands, tightening ivy, and snagged lines, then let you trace each mark with a single black fingernail, one that so often has traced designs and doodles and words meant for some sort of private eyes. Maybe in the same fashion as a gardener who takes close care of his plants, you'll fill up a watering can and just pour the clear mercury over me and let the ink that was once permanent to a sponges scrubbing and scouring, melt off my skin like the candle wax that dripped on a now sealed envelope. Without a dried casing covering my body, I would find those long trapped words, and hold them over a flickering flame, and as the paper turns to ash, as the metal trashcan that I drop the letter into starts to emanate heat, I'd once more be brought to the brick fireplace, to your chest, to honey covered lips that drip onto the flowers that I trod on.