what matters.

what matters is the color of the floor
unwashed and sticky
blackness between the boards, the
sweat beading salty and
wet on my hands,
the shape of her brow
as she smiles at me
more than she frowns and
the times when I can say
‘this is how I feel’ ask
‘how did you see it’ and actually
listen to the words unwashed
and porous slipping from her mouth…

what matters are the curtains
pale and see-through that I
fold back in her room to let
her know that yes,
this is hard, and yes,
I love you…

what matters is the white, creamy
leaf my friend made in the hot chocolate
on the way here, how we
stood awkwardly and I felt
as excited as if she
were a candy shop, and I
a child…

what matters is the space between
words, a call and answer
to the place where weeping
has a meaning through the years,
a deepening of tears caught like
lightening bugs in a jar, beating their
insistent wings against the clear place
where once, there was sky…

what matters is -
the words, caught
frozen unheard, thawing to
a thick, churning blur, a
modern testament to the
heaving vestment cast off
like light
in the dark…

what matters is the waking, sweaty, aching
need tumbling through muscle through
bone through blood pumping to
places it’s never known, what
matters is that we never travel too far
from our own, what matters is
getting us all to see that there is more
than just me, and what matters
is the screaming released motion
of emotion throttled by the
prayers of our peers trying to save reputation through
indigestible classification, ad personification
of the american dream, a
“straight god on vacation”
sipping cocktails in another nation
while we sit at home
eat alone
and forget what it’s like
outside this life protected dome…

what matters is the cool
blue of her eyes when we were
walking
muddied, crunching through the late
winter snow, and she
looked at me
as if we could both
see, in that moment,
what mattered.