Dear Poet...

Dear Poet,

You and I have never met, but we’ve both hidden in notebooks.

We've danced in the deep abyss of uncharted pages only to find we hadn’t yet learned to swim.

We've climbed mountains of secrets to get to Truth without tethering a line to ourselves.

We’ve both been lies to ourselves.

We've both been trapped between a rock and the hard places of ourselves, wrapped between the mockery and the guarded places of ourselves just so we could spin webs of "maybes" for ourselves like:

"maybe Silence is always kind enough to break our fall."

"Maybe Quiet is really a gentleman, Stillness is his brother, and they’re both so fond of us because speaking has never really been kin."

"Maybe endings really are better places to begin, metaphors are broken lenses, and listening is really seeing."

"Maybe writing is just wishful thinking on paper and this encounter is just another opportunity to come true."

Dear poet,

we both spend our days falling from the sky.

We careen toward dense celestial crusts, leaving orbit, blaring through atmospheres crowded by the dust of the past.

We catch wishes while catching on fire with an audience of 7 billion oblivious to life lived in OmniMax resolution.

I too have no solution for having been explosively born, for having been formed in the likeness of bombs that never need detonators, for having been taught to prepare others for impact by half-building shelters around our reputations.

We both find mushroom clouds in our first impressions and nuclear waste in the moments we forget to cherish.

We decay like the ruin of Hiroshima; radioactive and, therefore, influential.

Seeping into the pores of those too stubborn to evacuate our presence, we mutate brain matter on purpose. We break down one atom at a time just so new species can find home in the pieces we leave behind.

This is redemption, dear poet.

Because people find solace in words.

And without poetic ways to say them we’re all just stars on silent paths to black holes and nuclear reactions void of fusion.

We became the composite forms of our refusals to be ourselves just so others can see themselves in our reflections, so they can know what it’s like to wish upon others and actually come true, to light personal fuses and survive the blast, to live secretly while still being known, dear poet.

We cannot hide in notebooks forever because someone has yet to hear their story.

And you and I?

You and I: we're just an infinite number of poems away from finally telling it.

Leave the sky behind. Abandon your detonation zone.

I promise constellations will look better rearranged.

And you’ll find that every bruised landscape in your audience really does deserve a chance to heal.