Home

I walk into our home and you have incense burning. It smells like smoke and rotting pumpkins and I want so badly to tell you that it doesn't smell like home but this is home which is absoultely confusing to my brain. You have the incense burning and I'm burning on the inside wanting badly to pull you in close,put my nostrils up to your shirt to escape the smell that fills this house. I want to smell you, my actual home. I want to be draped across your lap like a french gril on a fancy vaction and bask in your aroma. I come further inside our home that doesn't smell like home and you finally pull me in close enough that our bodies could be mistaken for one body. I smell you and I get flashbacks of our lives. Our first kiss, your morning dances, the way your hair lays across your forehead when you first wake up, our afternoon walks. I'm utterly postive now that I am home, wrapped up inside your arms standing in our kitchen. It's funny how a smell can mean everything, how the smell of you could hold so much space inside my heart. I relax inside your arms and repeat inside my head I am home, I am home, this is home. You are my home and I'll always perfer the smell of you over incense. -M.D.L

I’ll love you through the realms

I wonder who you are when your soul is tired of searching for me in all the realms but this one. Did you ever even love me here in this existence? Did your heart scream for me in words "I love you" or was I just a convienience for your boredom? I’ll always be sure that I loved you, here in this now but how can you love someone who has no clue how to love you back in their current form. Is love worth it if it exists somewhere between here and all that could be? If it’s not promised in this life but maybe the next.. I’ll never be certain. Our love wasn’t born for this world, it wasn’t wrapped up in a pretty little bow and handed to us. It was drug through the mud, spit out and chewed up. So much so that I am not sure it exists outside my own heart. I’m not sure it ever could survive here in this life. Maybe in the next life your love will set my soul on fire and I’ll forget I ever doubted its existence in the first place. Maybe in the next life we won’t have missed out on what was meant for us. Just not now, not here in this current phase. In this phase our love is grasped under our finger tips only to float into the abyss slowly. It cannot be captured with quick hands, it passes us by like the seasons. My heart yearning and yours running so fast I can’t tell it was here in the first place. Love is finicky and requires the right place, right time and this universe never gave us that. In the next life maybe we will “just know” but in the here and now I’ll continue to miss what could have been. I’ll continue to miss a love that never got the chance to exist because this world was to harsh to our hearts.

Homes of the selfish

I have wrapped my own arms around my chest several times and called it healing. I have dove headfirst into my very being only to pull out what looks like sadness and acts like pain. There is a home here inside me, it swallows me whole and provides comfort where there is none to be found. I drown in this complexity, the feeliing of being both whole and broken. I found a home inside me where you found nothing but an empty version of what I once could have been. I am all that I was and all I could ever be and I dont know if that will ever be enough. I drown within myself knowing that the only person I truly need to impress is me. The only arms that will protect me now dangle at my sides, connected to my body. I am much my own before anyone elses and I dont know if that makes me selfish or wise.I am my own safe haven the only place I have ever felt both comfort and heartache is within these internal walls. I can reside here, inside myself drowning in my complex emotions. While you wonder if I will ever change I will be inside myself fighting to stay the same protecting myself from the moments that could be. All i ever wanted to be was myself,naked in my truth standing tall while you wanted to watch me wither and crumble. I often wonder which move makes one of us the selfish one. I will rot inside this body before i ever let you make me less of a home to my own soul. -M.D.L

I love you.

I choke on my words, they are stuck where my uvula meets the back of my throat, being suffocated slowly. I gag wanting to release every word I could use to describe how I feel about you. They won’t come out and I’m stuck trying to make them appear on this paper like a magician at a street fair. I start with I love you but it doesn’t seem enough. I could throw up sonnets, fourteen lines confessing how I love you will never be enough but instead I choke on every syllable, every rhyme. I have so much to say to you but art can’t be rushed and I feel my throat collapsing in on itself like an accordion when I’m around you. I love you is too simple. You deserve the longest poem I have ever written, a spoken word night dedicated to the way you have trapped my heart inside your own rib cage. I love you won’t escape my lips because it doesn’t fit with how the way you look at me makes me feel. I love you drowns in my saliva and is swallowed whole because it will never amount to the way my soul dances with yours. I love you is suffocated until I can muster up the words to describe how my life is better with you in it. I love you is too simple. I will choke until words more meaningful bleed through this paper because I love you just simply isn’t enough. Our love is art and art can’t be rushed with words like I love you.