Yellowheart

Memories not all my own as seen through a yellow sun shade.

You once said to me, halfway in

That I still gave you butterflies;

I never stopped feeling them holding up my skin.

So yeah, it’s hard to know when to go

When you’ve got nowhere to go;

But it is always easy to stay,

Retroactively thinking that there was no one else you’d rather be.

I’ve always wanted to be that worth remembering to you;

Sometimes I think I’m getting close,

Like how I might someday successfully remember childhood

In the form of the feeling of that one-time phenomenon

Of sunny summer morning fog,

Made golden dust in between your fingers.

Like dust motes

Burning up the back of a car ride home;

Or the galaxies made yellow from the distance and retelling

That I keep seeing in your eyes.

You don’t need a mirror to see them, never have.

You just haven’t remembered that yet.

 

And yeah, I’ve lain awake late, late into remembered tomorrows

Trying harder and harder to match

The rhythms of the ripples that shiver across my skin

Every time I think of your grin,

To the warm timing of your breathing.

You know I heard you breathe harder

Than the skin-size earthquakes from when our combined heart beats,

While we cut our own supporting branches

And break,

Snap calling half serious dripping amber-

Blood skipping screams of:

“Mayday, Mayday, Timber and we’re going down laughing!”

Grab fistfuls of my hair and tumble

Into a hot handed hug,

All full of safety and even longer looks of longing.

I set myself on fire

And danced while you took pictures

So that at least some memory of me would live on longer

Than myself while I am consumed to dust

With living life to its hottest.

It’s not a bad thing

That flowers shoot through days like clouds caught on a time lapse.

 

To put me out you held my hand under the sheets

And tight in yours to keep the whispering oxygen out,

Even as you fell asleep despite the thunder and crash

Of your soft-voiced smile teaming up

With the worn but unknown creases and joints between my fingers,

And with years of Sun-soaked heavy summer days

To rethink my heartwood swirls into hot

Yellow

Memories of us smiling forever, and sometimes floating

Free in a June blizzard of flower petals

And sunlight blades of grass reaching up

To help hold us down.

I remember grabbing your hand in mine and stepping off

Of the weight on my chest,

And drifting towards you in a sea of stars

And stardust:

We couldn’t tell them apart,

And we had already come to terms with

Trying to not need longer Yesterdays

In order to better get to Better Tomorrows.

 

I stowed away

In the tight spaces between our clasped hands,

Holding onto our very best

While making room for all of our most needed worst.

My hand on your battle scarred wrist

Sent shivers shattering down my spine

For not having blocked those bullets,

While your heart pumps yellow paint across my camera eyes

And into my still-life mind until every past memory is amber,

And has a sparkling new golden border like a photograph

Prized just for its own introspective stance on life.

Simultaneously and in the space just between

A rise of warmth to the cheeks from walking out into the sunlight,

And the twitch of a hand just as it is let go,

All of my old borders and frames of reference were smashed,

My pulse pounding into my ears, and through me as

Yellow burned into white,

And white flashed into you.

 

I got swept up,

Heart racing to the point where everything meets,

Exactly between feeling like there is no longer any such thing as “Bad Luck,”

And your smile when it’s so big that I hear it;

Feel it in my bones more than see it.

It held me up

For as long as it took me to fully arrive here with you and this grassy field of stars,

And I feel like I’ve never breathed before in these outer

Spaces previously lost dark in my mind.

It was exactly then that Time meant nothing more than Now,

As you gave me a look so honestly full of love

That I overflowed,

And my jaw gripped itself tight

With the terror that you would find out

Somehow, that there were several moments in my life that I can admit

That I did not think of you…

But they were just a few.

And I struggled

To be worth watching when it lit my skin

Soft like the moon from behind the Sun.

It made me wonder

If one look could contain so much earnest possibility,

And the answer,

The answer comes when people ask you where you’ve been,

Where you’ve traveled, where you’ve eaten at,

And what you have seen.

 The answer comes when we see people

Who have traded looking for it

For a sunnier and much more grassy Forever.

As if the Sun would ever move there,

But it’s true:

Some people spend their whole lives

Imagining where they will die.

Thanks to you,

I now know where I will inevitably,

And with a solidifying sense of purpose

Live.

Reviews

[cest la vie]

I am no longer here at the cafe, but a little bird told me of this new post.

This is an absolute number one stunner..I have never forgotten how well you create magic with your words. You have so many lines here in this piece that can stand alone , a poem unto themselves..

I read this, remember these emotions and walk away smiling.
Truly one of the best pieces I had read anywhere, ever...


Excellent Jackson...most excellent..you should be very proud of this piece.

[Charles]

These epic poems are really tough for those of us with short attention spans. What I can tell you is that there are some real gems scattered throughout this poem (lines, metaphors, analogies). The ending is really quite strong, though I don't know that it was the strongest stanza since others rise up to match it. Thanks for the memories.