“Don’t stay where you are needed. Go where you are loved.”

Be patient. Your voice will find its way into the world, not in one loud instance but a steady trickle that turns into a deluge.

Understand that we must lose our way, over and over, before we can find the best version of ourselves.

Here’s the story of my life. Hoping they would care about me or wishing they wouldn’t care so much.

I don’t know if what we had was love, but if it wasn’t, I hope never to fall in love. Because of you, I know I am too fragile to bear it.

I look for you, the way I was taught to look both ways when crossing the road. Uptight and wary, bracing myself for something I know could break me.

It is the mark of a great poet to write words that feel as though they have stood witness to your most intimate memory of love.

I had no way of knowing, when I was sitting alone in that tiny bedroom, that in just a few short months, I would meet the love of my life: a man who lived across the ocean from me, in a little house by the sea.

My father was a house,my mother was a home.

Doesn’t your soul remain the age you were when you first fell in love?

Some Time Out The time may not be prime for us, though you are a special person. We may be just two different clocks, that do not tock, in unison.

Sometimes I am caught between poetry and prose, like two lovers I can’t decide between. Prose says to me, let’s build something long and lasting. Poetry takes me by the hand, and whispers, come with me, let’s get lost for awhile.

Every day I measure the weight of my past against the present and feel the drag of what could have been.

It is only the year that is ending. So why does it feel like the world is?

He and I When words run dry, he does not try, nor do I. We are on par. He just is, I just am, and we just are.

In many ways, a book is, in itself, a tiny universe. Each page is like a newly formed galaxy, fashioned from a single, pulsing thought. A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time.

Now I know being close to you was never about the proximity.