If you don’t know who you are, poets, come closer. You are churches of blood, bone, and muscle, titanium-willed, down-filled. Your stained glass lasts long past black-and-white worlds you spray paint. I wonder why you wander around not knowing you’re holy, wholly grounded in splendor. Surrounded by offenders and apathy, the only path you see is forever evergreen. Gods peer out from your eyes, hold golden mirrors to me. 

Forgive me for forgetting your trophy cuz you always make due with a pen. You stay real, unjaded, unpersuaded by a world that kicks kindness to the curb. Everything you own in a box-to-the-left. Left for dead, unfed, unread, underestimated but still your peace is said in barbed bars and starving stars that somehow saved me, so there’s safety under my branches. Lie down here.   

Your passion to type art fashions your hearts into keyboards. Each ventricle a vehicle for chauffeuring offerings to the Queen of Hearts. Your letters let her fancy you a dealer, but you are priceless exhibits, so I museum your fine minds, the kind they illustrate in medical books, each quadrant a rose. Scented and sunned and watered. I prune your 6th sense sensibility, unearthly positivity you scroll into oracles, fortune cookies I devour like a monster.     

How do you do it? With hurts as vast as Palestine, Russian war-crime, bodies burning in melting tents, only weak pretense for tolerance, friends who swear they care then lie, only a faint sigh when Pandora unfurls her box hinges for the millionth time. 

Sex is trafficked across borders, elite hoarders pile gold while unpayable bills unfold like Origami nightmares in stories untold with more antagonists than we can count. You account for them all, injuries large, and small-minded people who subsidize pain.  

Beloved, do you weep words? Fall asleep to metaphors banging on doors, dig similes from junk drawers dying to be repurposed. We need, rarely heed, missives you bleed. Stay strong though. 

I lift my glass to you. Each champagne bubble doubles as a wish, a soft kiss to the top of your heads, a caress that weds your souls to mine. Stay happy while unpacking tragedy. Don’t be Atlas. At last glance, your last dance was a samba among constellations, and your meteor shower shows you’re poets aglow with shadows only Venus knows are attached to you, latched to your heels, matched to your size. You are enormous, magnificent, bathed in perfume only gods know never to waste.  

---