Everything

I want you to want me

I need you to need me

Facebook posts and Top 40 pop songs croon

"you are my everything,"

but I've been standing 

on my porch watching the rain for days now

and so far, the flowers

haven't uprooted themselves. 

Their beauty suspended between ground and sky,
deep in earth but no less reaching for each bead of hope-soaked rain,

I'd love you to love me

I'm begging you to beg me.

I've been thinking
I'd love you to love the way the leaves cannot kiss the air without their branches,

I beg you to sunburn from hours on your knees in the field with questions,

I need you to need the feeling of your muscles aching at night from your heart's running, to run your hands underwater until your cracked thoughts heal.

I need you to speak the hum of the bee's wings in summer,

I want you to know where my skin ends and yours begins
so we can truly know how well it fits together

I need you to know I wear armor

but my heart opens faster than my body.

Shine up my old brown shoes, sometimes

The dancers say that when their toes finally touch rosin-smeared wood after their partner lifts them

their feet feel a little lighter,

This is how I will know you.

Standing, silent,

reminding my ribbon-wrapped blisters they belong only to this music...

I want to you to want to dance more than you ever want to hold me. 

To the next person I love,
we can never be everything, so
I will be a hope-soaked raindrop, and you

will be the strands of sun at six in the morning, 

rising, 

wrapping each bend of my body in warmth

bringing everything

in my eyes

alight.