with no sadness:
my feet are firm upon the earth,
my hand writes this letter on the road,
and in the midst of life I shall be
always
beside the friend, facing the enemy,
with your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never broke away from yours.❞
But I do want to spend my life with you.
And I want to know that fifty years from now when you’re in a hospital room and getting ready to die, when visiting hours are for family members only, I want to know they’ll let me in to say goodbye.
‘Cause I’ve been fifty years memorizing how the lines beneath your eyes form rivers when you cry and I’ve held my hand like an ocean at your cheek saying, “Baby, flow to me.”
‘Cause fifty years I’ve watched you grow with me – fifty years of you never letting go of me, through nightmares and dreams and everything in between from the day I said “Buy me a ring.” Buy me a ring that will turn my finger green so I can imagine our love is a forest – because I wanna get lost in you.
And I swear I grew like a flower every hour of the fifty years I was with you.
“I Do,” Andrea Gibson
knowledge and these rich, fruitless, unspoken words.❞
For fifty years, you were my favorite poem and I’d read you every night knowing I might never understand every word but that’s okay – ‘cause the lines of you were the closest thing to holy I’d ever heard.
You’d say, “This kind of love has to be a verb.”
“I Do,” Andrea Gibson
Then being collected by your fingers and held like a wish.
I promise
That whatever I do
I will always try my best
To come true.❞
It is incredible what kind of mess I can make
with a nine-hour drive and an unanswered text.
Yes, that is me
crying to the tollbooth man.
I say,
‘In the ghost town of our love
there is a player piano
trying to prove it can make music
without being touched.
My fingertips miss her so much.’
He hands me no change.
Staircase, Andrea Gibson
