Safe Distance

Safe Distance

Words spoken like yards sticks of safe distance

Lines written, lines sent to make it

Clear that you are not sure if you are ready

To commit to inching an aperture in that gate

Penning all that you hold in to venture out later

Entering spring and the first week of March,

“I am interested in getting to know you better,

Thanks for the kind words”

Near given up and silence grows, the last week of March and I begin to know

“Thanks for your number” with digits extended, no explanation no expanse

Just an opportunity left in my hands

And so I call and reach to you and in receive a “Can I call you back in an hour?” postponement

And never hear the returning turn back to me to reassure that this is something that you were sure

That you were wanting and so I sit and contemplate the hunting of you in a puzzle building

An enigma on the window sill confused and still, asking for clarity through this maze

So I suggest a picnic and a coin for you to choose the path to adjoin,

Joy or regret, which will you accept, and as March ends you begin to send

A thank you for the invite and the first breach from behind the wall

“I am interested in meeting you. I have to admit,

I felt a lot of pressure from you initially. Hence the reason I was quiet”.

And in these words I began to understand

The girl behind the poker chips and the suits sitting in her hand

And so we speak and plan a night where you reassure yourself that this is a date

That is somehow real and capable of touching you behind your aviator shields

From my blueberry quail and sobriety’s hand to hold next to mine inside a brew house

Secure and timed out and in control of everything and nothing

Wanting to hold on and let go in the roll of who you are off your tongue

I am in one set stare of a woman unfurling before me, seeing her bare

Naked like a road map of dots connecting and piecing like the

First stitches of a needle point outline to possibility behind jade eyes

I can see the bigger picture of what could be in the template background

That need for time for her to see what I see in her reflected in me

A girl with a heart aching to share all that is in there,

Not identical, not a twin but this wonderful complement

And in that you make sense to me

Sticky-noted points on the walls of my mind,

That you wanted to see your boyfriend’s family even after departing from him

Parents divorcing at thirteen and this gap for a family’s embrace of your own

With a brother in Montana and the reversal of a child raising her parents

On her own and all alone, seven years and your brother saw a different world

In this night I kiss you and I feel the crevice of your soul shudder

In the way you inch back in the curve of your nape and ask me what cologne I am wearing

As if there is a startling connecting of a synapse promulgated by your olfactory processes

Of the possibilities expanding into the curl of something deeper

If only for that second, like a slip or a moment of freedom allowed

That must just as quickly revert back to the schedule and business of regulating

The timing of your life and waking up at five a.m.

To fit in the endless list of what is mandatory over titillating

I ask you to a punk show and a festival of dancing in the streets

I wait a week on a soccer field biding this expanse

You send me your email address, your birthday and a sideways-smiling emoticon

And a voice mail of rescheduled cancelation while I am staring at this musical concrete

Wondering and in the indecision, I make call to ask you to change your mind

And in your response you reveal more to me than before

I am pleasantly rewarded in your choice of limited-resources of time

To give me the opportunity to share with you part of myself

You had the inherent empathy to see that I needed to share

In that dichotomy of a decision between you and the average

There is a difference in spotlight that matters

To me you are worth these waits

These weeks of March and April spent to see you some afternoon in May

Split amongst tumbleweeds of days rolling in an undecided countryside

Because I trust that soon enough you will find rest within your path for now

To open up the caverns gate, to roll the boulder from the shadowed hall

Of the sentences that have prompted this stall

And make a choice to either let me in or let me go

To see me as a man worth depositing hope

Like a toll to overcome the tipping-point of love’s possibility

Into your life like the angle of light expanding through a midnight doorway

A reverse shadow of space illuminating that which makes you, you

And this time to get to know that woman is worth it to me

For this is not an exercise in patience, but in recognition of who and where you are

And helping you see the man with the headlight and the spelunking cap

Repelling down cave walls to take your hand and find jewels

I see their flints, their sparkles from the surface in the light of day

You can question why I see them or why the amethyst or emeralds shine

Like the iris grows I see the flower in your eyes, a beauty stark and struck me through

All these mistakes and stumbles were just the staircase

Here in trust to a path I do not know, but I want you in my life

I want this chance because I see an open well, miles of cavernous gems held

And I can take these reasons why, spelled out like a connect the dots color by number

Fill in the blank pattern puzzle book, but in all things natural there is a measure of faith

I will assume and bare out knowing my life and the reciprocal of this want

May pressurize your caverns walls, an inert gas to suffocate or truncate the length of time

You feel forcing an immature decision to stay or go from that which you have grown accustomed

To question these footsteps up and outward from the liberties of a single life

Independent of concern from you whom you dub to be a counterpart

And you can send me a picture-less postcard just saying hello

Like a line of demarcation to set limits on that what you are prepared to convey

And I can feel a level of reassurance in the overture of your recollection outside my presence

Touching a subsurface layer in me that is difficult to verbalize the implications

As it bounces around the under-workings of my wants in all ways good

Because your safe distance is obvious, marked off like orange cones in a street

Through traffic and swarm of what-ifs knowing I must penitently find a place

Of stasis in these emotions to not stir them like a hornets hive of directions

That have no place to proliferate at this juncture

I can see your safe distance like a sealed over bullet wound,

Despite your claims of no broken bones, questions so many balloons in the air

As they all drop on you at the midnight hour of turning thirty

With the clock of questions of “what do I want” popping out like fortune cookie-slips

From the bellies of helium pumped concerns

That none of that matters except for the choices you will make

To choose a chance on me, that I can not assure you will never hurt

Or that I can prognosticate beyond the horizon of these initial weeks

To suggest some pontificated measure of permanence when we are still

Preparing these preschool steps of who we may become

But I can promise my honesty, my candor, and my support like stalwart lions

In guard to the walls of my city, a bastion from those concerns to fall like feathers

Under the umbrella of my arms, to know I have no desire to vacate this path

And the man I purport is the man you will see at each chime of each hour of each tick of the clock

And if you choose to depart and pull the grenade’s pin

I will hurt.  I will miss you for both who you are and who I hoped for,

But I will understand and pray for your happiness.

My identity is forged in fires far hotter than any pain I can imagine you causing me

I am a man in full knowing the seesaw of my strengths, proud of the lengths

I have ventured to establish who I am as a human, a writer, a professional, a father

A lover, a servant, a brother, a friend and either I am all of this or nothing to you

Because to me you are magnetic, an attraction with the gravity of Jupiter’s call

And I can not fathom knowing you exist with out wanting to affix

My sights on your island as I cross these oceans, like an oasis of clarity

To all this world’s disparity to conflict with what I never thought possible

Would enter my life in such a simple and apparent aura