Words...

“I want to watch your mouth move as you talk to me
That’s all I ever want from the people I love
Flowers are good and all
But moving mouths mean so much more
When they are moving in front of my eyes
And sometimes people are like poison
And their teeth are the things that hold on to you
For years and years
And no matter how much you move and bend
And shake and cry out
They never let you go.
My father once said that all people are strangers
Until they write words to each other
Or look at each other from across a crowded train
Or bus
Or street
And we wrote words to each other
The first words were ‘hi’
And ‘how are you’
Nothing big but they were
Big
To me
If it is true that sometimes
People are like poison
Then it must also be true
That sometimes people
Are like holy water
Not the kind that lives in churches
No
The kind that live in puddles
Or kettle ponds or lakes
Or sometimes rivers
The constant flow never ends
The love will never cease to be
It all just moves
And moves
And moves
Back where it came from
Back into the ocean.
~ “for c”- esperanza friel

I Want To...

I want to hold your hand on a cold night,
and wake up to your face on a
Saturday morning.

I want to travel the vast expanse of your
mind and scare the evil spirits and bad
thoughts away.

I want to fall asleep to the pure sound of
your heartbeat and taste the tantalizing
feel of your skin.

I want to wrap my arms tight around you
and never let you go.

I want to fall asleep to the sound of your
voice and wake up to the beauty of your
smile.

I want to kiss you from head to toe
and drown in your carefree laugh.

I want you, in your entirety,
and I want to love you
endlessly.
~ Julie Martinez

Karma and Grace

Life is a struggle between being gracious and exacting vengeance. Between forgiveness and retribution. Between love and hate. Between being kind and being an ass. I know the way in my heart and yet my mind chooses a different path. My ego wants to hit back when I feel wronged but my soul longs to console.

I want my pound of flesh. But who is the one to weigh the preciseness of the weight? Who is the judge of the flesh? Who am I in the tension of life?


"Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate."
~Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Act 4: Scene 1)


Life is not about karma but about grace. No one can cut only a pound. There are always consequences and ramifications in any attempt to cut only a pound. In cutting there is always drops of blood.

Sin can never outrun grace. The continual wrong turns on the dirt roads of life will be met with the highway of grace.

A New Day...

"I am not the first person you loved.

You are not the first person I looked at

with a mouthful of forevers. We

have both known loss like the sharp edges

of a knife. We have both lived with lips

more scar tissue than skin. Our love came

unannounced in the middle of the night.

Our love came when we’d given up

on asking love to come. I think

that has to be part

of its miracle.

This is how we heal.

I will kiss you like forgiveness. You

will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms

will bandage and we will press promises

between us like flowers in a book.

I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat

on your skin. I will write novels to the scar

of your nose. I will write a dictionary

of all the words I have used trying

to describe the way it feels to have finally,

finally found you.

And I will not be afraid

of your scars.

I know sometimes

it’s still hard to let me see you

in all your cracked perfection,

but please know:

whether it’s the days you burn

more brilliant than the sun

or the nights you collapse into my lap

your body broken into a thousand questions,

you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I will love you when you are a still day.

I will love you when you are a hurricane."

~ Clementine von Radics, Mouthful of Forevers  

Love ~ Feeling, Falling & Blindness

Love is not given or taken ~ it is realized. It is awakened to ~ as from a deep sleep...

To know love is to search for who to love. A subject of fidelity. To choose to love is irrational. Inherent in the journey is risk. Trepidation draws the foot back from the edge while fear closes the possibility to love. Perhaps this explains the penchant for characterizing love as falling or as blindness? To move with abandon towards love is to close our eyes and tumble towards it in the dark. Kissing with our eyes shut reminds us of the vertigo, darkness and inexplicable simplicity of a lips touching - love's manifestation of feeling and surrender.

Love is time delicately shared. Love is wiping tears from weeping eyes. Love is movement. Love is accepting the loss of love.

Love is a relationship which grows from an emotional attachment, a connectedness of feeling emanating from the soul of being. This makes the physicalness - a kiss, a touch, an embrace...sublime. It also provokes intense pain when absence or betrayal of the attachment enters the heart. It is not infidelity to the physical act of intimacy which causes pain but the emotion and meaning behind it, within it, and the possibility of what may be ahead of it which strains the very core of what it means to be human. This I believe in some way begins to approach what love is and is not.