Is there a Guantanamo on your heart?
Danny's words sometimes haunt my car rides home.
I can see the distance he mentions in the curve of Tej's arms when he is drunk and affectionate. The nights when he doesn't speak, only touches and I remember how easy it is to be quiet.
The rainbows Danny makes remind me of Keele, the way his voice sometimes gets honest and sometimes goes over the line. Keele who says babygirl, who can't stand himself or any of us but is still full of more love than anyone else I know and he's funny. Not just comedian funny, not just happy boy onstage making the crowd love him funny, but confusing and beautiful and still figuring out this world around him funny. I love that boy, and his flaws that stick out like hip bones.
Keele's is the hand that I held when the IV entered his arm right at the elbow and he looked scared for the first time since I'd met him. When my mother tells me that my father needs surgery, I remember the way Keele's still-blonde hair pulsed against the clean linen of the hospital. I remember stealing medical supplies and watching the pale lines of his back under that gown, the souvenirs of red irritation from some girls fingernails.
Rob has this smile that could capture stars like a piece of fly paper. He went to high school with Tim, and now they live down the hall in the same fraternity house. The two of them have saved me in more ways than I can count. Like Danny's gargoyle poem, they are strength without needing it and silly and pretty and so full of hope. They stand not like a music box, but like twin speakers to a boombox that plays all the sweet optimism of your favorite hometown band and all the beauty you miss from when you believed in first crushes.
Danny writes poems about revolution without ever using the word, and I think of the night that Tej told me he shot a man. The night Keele spoke the name of his dead best friend. The night Rob held me in his living room while I sobbed and the night after that, when I threw up on their front porch and Tim carried me out of the cold.
The world is still growing out of my hands everyday. But the bigger it gets, the more beauty I find. And the more space I seem to discover inside of myself, the more love I find to fill it with. Surrounded by True Gentlemen, "hipster trash" and girls too pretty for their own good, I am finding more open arms than I am locked doors. I am lovely in love with this universe.
I can see the distance he mentions in the curve of Tej's arms when he is drunk and affectionate. The nights when he doesn't speak, only touches and I remember how easy it is to be quiet.
The rainbows Danny makes remind me of Keele, the way his voice sometimes gets honest and sometimes goes over the line. Keele who says babygirl, who can't stand himself or any of us but is still full of more love than anyone else I know and he's funny. Not just comedian funny, not just happy boy onstage making the crowd love him funny, but confusing and beautiful and still figuring out this world around him funny. I love that boy, and his flaws that stick out like hip bones.
Keele's is the hand that I held when the IV entered his arm right at the elbow and he looked scared for the first time since I'd met him. When my mother tells me that my father needs surgery, I remember the way Keele's still-blonde hair pulsed against the clean linen of the hospital. I remember stealing medical supplies and watching the pale lines of his back under that gown, the souvenirs of red irritation from some girls fingernails.
Rob has this smile that could capture stars like a piece of fly paper. He went to high school with Tim, and now they live down the hall in the same fraternity house. The two of them have saved me in more ways than I can count. Like Danny's gargoyle poem, they are strength without needing it and silly and pretty and so full of hope. They stand not like a music box, but like twin speakers to a boombox that plays all the sweet optimism of your favorite hometown band and all the beauty you miss from when you believed in first crushes.
Danny writes poems about revolution without ever using the word, and I think of the night that Tej told me he shot a man. The night Keele spoke the name of his dead best friend. The night Rob held me in his living room while I sobbed and the night after that, when I threw up on their front porch and Tim carried me out of the cold.
The world is still growing out of my hands everyday. But the bigger it gets, the more beauty I find. And the more space I seem to discover inside of myself, the more love I find to fill it with. Surrounded by True Gentlemen, "hipster trash" and girls too pretty for their own good, I am finding more open arms than I am locked doors. I am lovely in love with this universe.