You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

I want to always be a size queen ’cause that’s how I found you— lifting the spirits of everyone around like a hot air balloon just from the way you burned to be a better person today than you were the day before. Burning to be better is my favorite quality on anyone, and you are on fire

Because the truth is the last thing you would ever try to fake. So sometimes you look like a human scribble, like a two-year-old has colored you in, like you have too many feelings to stay inside the lines of your own skin. But that, my friend, is the masterpiece.

when I get to heaven, I will refuse to call it heaven if the people I love (who put me through hell) aren’t there.

I know it’s because I was a terrible juggler. I couldn’t figure out how to hold something and set it free at the same time. So I dropped the ball. Convinced myself I was up in the air about you when really I was up in the air about me. It’s what we do—turn our bodies into museums of what was broken. Blame

I see I wasn’t running from the war back then. I was running from the peace. The love I did not believe I was worth.

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it? Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the present.

What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole? There are holes in every inch of the fabric that makes me who I am,

If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

Trauma is a pretty word for how to die every day of the year,