From Rooms

"It takes time to know who you are and even more time to be okay with it or to change it, so every once in a while it feels really nice when someone lays their head back and tells me that it's really comfortable here.

There's always that place inside you, you know, a place that no one sees unless you let them. You can always know who you are that way. I have a friend who started creating his room really young. He needed to. He'd been beaten and raped so many times. He needed control, everything to be in its place. He needed peace.

There is soft music flowing in his room, and art, and stars like mine, and when I go there I can fall into his gentleness so completely, sometimes I never want to leave."

Foster Care

They are a couple who have offered to share

their home. He stays up with me for a late

night snack of ice cream

wondering about my life, wondering what is

in my head...wondering.

At the next place, children surround the

foster mom's body like little mice, scurrying

around happily for her attention.

Big woman. Big chest.

She hugs you from a mile away.

Another couple, this time reserved,

cookies on the counter uneaten confuse me.

Big religion, the Antichrist, the Rapture,

things I do not understand.

I do not understand

other people's homes, open, yet walled off.

Laminated. Opaque. Secretless.

Though I wait with them, I cannot touch their

dustless shelves.

Don't they know, I'm not this doll.

The Love I Must Learn to Give

When I was young I ran to people,

ran into people, crash,

with no one to pick up

the pieces but me.

I'm beautiful, my heart is, I know,

but sometimes I'm as

twisted inside as a baobab,

unsettled as a tornado.

At these times, I cannot run to anyone,

because I know, no man,

no one, nothing can save me,

except the love I must learn to give myself.

Love

If in the course of our

waiting, our disillusion,

and our thousandth little death,

a warm hand comes to gently touch us,

a kind face looks with

acceptance upon our own,

to see us as we've wanted to be seen,

to see all the world has stained in us as pure,

to sponge and sift and show us our new selves

with each word and each touch,

understanding our frailty and without

judgment, rendering strength.

If all this human honesty, this beauty and

transparency, for even one moment we

attempt to return,

we have loved.