Step Out Into The Wind With Me On This Frozen Night That Bears No Snow

Tell me why you ban the books Which tell stories of Two male penguins adopting a child, Books that show disabled kids And gender non conforming kids And black kids whose teachers Forget their names?

Tell me why you ban the books That challenge you Because they are written plainly About plain people Who are different from you?

Tell me why books are taken off shelves For being too explicitly queer When you force children to read Passages from the bible about Rape, genocide, slavery, and a hateful god? Why is your book not banned For depicting in detail such things?

What makes your book the exception? You censor children from truths And teach them a god will hate them Because they are different You teach children to hate themselves Because your book holds no space for them

I am laying in the tall grass On a cloudy afternoon The air is still, The grass does not blow In the wind or on a breeze

It is quiet, the birds are quiet There is an ant crawling On my arm, there is a Cottontail munching on Nearby dandelions

The gray clouds are peaceful They don't promise rain Now there is also a Small beetle on my shirt They are claiming me, these bugs

They are accepting me into their World of the tall grass Where the rabbits and moles live Where life is slower I will go inside later

I just want my cat to lie on my chest Smother my fears with his weight Trap me under his sleeping sprawl You can never move the sleeping cat

I want his body to cover my face I want to forget the world exists Cat fur and light snoring is all there is And purring, which can cure anything

The church bell chimes Eleven and I count One, two, three, and on And then after the last The soft cooing of an owl Plays above the forest Echoing across the sky As if to outplay the bell To claim this simple land For itself as it sings Every one of us to sleep

You are candlelight My yellow rose Every song I'll ever compose We are elegance And flowing words The freedom between Mated birds We've been thunder Pouring rain The healing after Endless pain I'm a soft brush With eternity Always painting You and me

It's in the sound of the crunch and The texture I feel in my shoes as The dead leaves crumble under my feet Breaking between my sole and the street

It's that darkest time of year again When I'm taken back to autumn After the colors have blown away And the world turns a numbing grey

I don't know how you held my love In your hands and just let it all go How you let me slip between your fingers And die face up beneath the snow

It's the howl of painfully naked trees I know them well, I cried with them And every year since I've cried again Because I don't know how to unfreeze

We are floating Through the seas Of the sky.

The gentle wind Grazes our skin And we sway, Oh, we sway.

We are flying Effortlessly Through the airwaves.

And the sun Is so bright It warms our souls And we smile, Oh, your smile.

We are radiating, Reflecting all the light That’s filling in our hearts.

The touch of your hand As we flow Leaves me breathless For a while.

We are floating, We are, Oh, we are.

And there are So many colors To your wings.

I will live alone Detached But I will be no spinster Perhaps instead A weaver Of loose threads That flow to me Over salty waves, making Their landing In the sands of a Beach I will never visit So the seagulls Will carry your damaged Pieces of fabric Home to me

I was assigned fire at birth Or so the star mappers say And I can identify with that With the colors, the heat Fire is a passion, yes, I am that

Water I've always envisioned As quiet, calm, serene But I met water as a flash flood There were never any warnings

I swam without being doused How is that possible? But it's something I've never Known since, water is wet after all

I can relate to earth, to air In fact, these elements speak to me More than fire or water have So I've belonged to both of them

Fire and water though How steamy we were together You'd think we would have clashed But we were purple, complementary

Time is the only element I've been seen with these days Water, at the end of it all My body consists mostly of you Which is really quite an apt metaphor

A small zen garden Sits on the therapist's desk To calm both of us