You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what’s missing but can’t stop pointing to what’s still there.

I don’t know that I ever got over you as much as I got under the engine of myself to fix the machine of my love, which now runs okay but still runs way too much, if you know what I mean, and I know you know what I mean,

Geese, unlike many birds, do not fly south at the first cold breeze. They wait until they are nearly buried by the blizzard. They stay until they can’t find one last edible seed.

A promised land is not a promised land if I can’t keep learning.

Finally understood I am the conductor of my own life and will be even after I die. I, like the trees, will decide what I become: porch swing? Church pew? An envelope that must be licked to be closed? Kinky choice, but I didn’t close. I opened and opened until I could imagine the pain was the sensation of my spirit not breaking, that my mind was a parachute that could always open in time, that I could wear my heart on my sleeve and never grow

How many senses have I had to shut down to have common sense? I don’t want my sense to be common, to pace a cubicle of conditioning—my dreams limited to a nap, my consciousness sold to the same folks buying extinction.