don't tell me about the best way to capture the ocean in your mouth. don't whisper to me late at night about the salt crescent moons behind the bend of your elbows or the way that the breeze is tangling my hair around your ears until you're deaf from the wind. don't, for you see it's easy to whisper poetry when the starlit sky is a cliche over the slumbering world; it's easy to be a poet when the ground is rising up to cradle your shoulder blades and the earth is whispering love notes to you in your sleep. this is when it's easy.

so don't write to me then.

instead, wait until the world is rejecting you from her breast and leaving you breathless and boneless on the carpeted floor. wait until your ribs are falling one by one like sand through your fingers and you're struggling to catch them and struggling to keep your feet and struggling to remember why you started this fight at all. wait until the ocean has woken up angry and is throwing a tantrum across your jaw, knocking your teeth out just to feel the pull of gravity as the tombstones hit the spiraling wake. wait until then.

hold your tongue until you are biting through the base and the blood is beginning to flood your lungs and staining the floorboards of your stomach walls. keep the words stored into ancient cabinets until the doors rot and fall open – until age isn't a far-fetched dream, but a creaking and arthritic reality. wait until you've properly matured the words and have let them simmer. until they are weathered and softened, hardened and grimy. wait, so that when the moon presses against the mountain's crest, when the sun dips into the salty belly of the ocean, when the volcano blows kisses to the stars you can release them.

then, let them go like the hounds of hell. let them burst from your lungs straight through your breast, biting at the bit and gulping at the oxygen. let them be wild-eyed with restless legs and a leaping heart for they will have been tested and tried and will have watched the world drown in ash. they will be young and vibrant and more eager for having being held dormant. they will be somber veterans and wiser for the bloodshed. they will be more than empty promises and teenage cries; they will be more than life as it previously was.

they will be love. they will be time. they will be deserving of the flourish of your pen.
so wait until the world has ended, until your heart has been tested, until your tongue tried.
wait and write to me then.