Dear Flower Child

Dear flower child,
With eyes of blue and cheeks of red,
You shift between the light
Of undying truth,
As if it lives trapped inside
The oceans of your eyes
Forever flowing toward me.
Although your cheeks will eternally turn away,
I hope you find yourself reflected
All along the upstate banks-
Not only in water but in ripe season,
In every tree's fractal leaves
Down to the tiniest vein,
Tracing it back to some lucidious reason
Growth could ever come to be
If we're constantly
In a state of both branching and breaking…
Dearest flower child,
With a heart pumping stardust
Into your perfect cherry lips
Kiss with love tender memories of
Who you thought you were back then
Not a failure in the sky,
For the art of you is too complex
To be confined by ideas like
A vulture’s definition of success
Or every way their projections
Have made you feel like less.
I hope you find the strength
To burn down that old house inside your chest…
I hope you howl at the dark moon and find
She was ever made to prove to the night
Our Sun must rise again.
I hope you listen to the birdsongs every daybreak.
With reverence, each melodic bid
Will also let all of Gaia know
It's safe again to raise our restless lids,
Breaking through the most human threats
That have always corrupted our shaking heads,
While I'm a world away,
Still and observing, hoping
We both hear the way
Every bird's verse is weaving
The face of god with every weft.
But even Beethoven knew,
Down to his dying breath,
You will only truly hear what you believe.

I've always been a flower child.
I learned young how to sink into the dirt,
Wondering if the best use of my bones
Would be to give them back unto the earth.
With my paper skin
revealing veins of blue,
When we first met, I was the stoner girl
Playing all the saddest tunes,
Never louder than the fiery smile I worked so hard to maintain.
Back then I identified with rainy days,
So soft I could remain, Because once upon a time I told me,
"Stop burdening them with your pain!
Be the tiny dancer you were born to be!"
And through every crack of thunderous rain
My body swayed, preaching to the clouds
As if a lightning strike could turn me
Into a saint,
If only it meant I could forgive the sinners
Who took my love away,
Dissolving every notion of cause, effect,
Or fault under these stars,
Praying all the wisdom of a sage
Could make me content
With our bodies never being ours…

In the end, everything is borrowed,
And nothing is here to stay.
Even old headboard carvings can only serve
As reminders of a time they couldn't preserve,
And that's okay.
I hope one day you see, flower child,
How I carry on by finding myself
In the patterns of nature's change,
As Her paradox is the only lasting truth
I've found on set this global stage.
I hope you see me when you notice
The birds when it's time to migrate,
For, I won't wait and hope forever
For you to truly see me
Or hear how much it means
To my soul when I whisper,
"For now, I think I'll stay."