If it is not too much to ask – a poem

Bring me your excess and your unreason.

Bring me your broken hearted devastation

At the state of the world, your passionate desire

For something better, your idealism,

Your most irrational hope and wildest optimism.

Show me the places where you are

Almost unbearably tender, already shattered,

Wounded and healing, dripping sweat and tears

Show me your scars. The ones the world inflicted

The ones you made in your own skin

Out of grim necessity, the need for art,

The quest for some kind of meaning.

Tell me the outlandish stories of how

You came to be here, tell me the preposterous

Dreams that define the path you mean to take.

Share with me the warmth of your hands

On my hands, the warmth of you leaning against me

The sacred, magic circles of arms and holding.

Share the rites of passage, the rituals of meaning.

Give me the parts of yourself you are most afraid of.

Give me the weight of your shame, your loneliness.

I am hungry for these things in ways almost no one

Understands but perhaps you are one of the few

Who can cough up jagged truth like owl pellets

And breathe the flames of your most unacceptable self

Into my life. Bring me your unspeakable longing

And your existential fear, tell me what is

Worth dying for, and harder still,

What is worth living for.

And perhaps I can kiss the part of your soul

That was always unkissable and perhaps

I can bring my too raw, bloody and dangerous

Tenderness to the parts of you that you fear

And perhaps there are enough of us we can

Devise new ways of being in the world

With our tendencies to bleed to death when wounded

And scream in pain and ecstasy

And set fire to ourselves

And love everything too fiercely

And ourselves not sufficiently.

Perhaps we can talk about it all night.

We can make sense of it a little,

Make welcome what we keep hidden in the dark

On the inside.

Bring me your excess and unreason

That I may promise fantastical things

And weave life out of that dreaming.