Honeysuckle kisses

So the other day I performed a poem called "goddess" and there's a line in it that goes "she has honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips", and my friend Andy Tran came up to me afterwards and asked where he could get one. I texted him a few days later, and this is the conversation that unfolded:

V: I figured out where you can get honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips. You can get them from letting her laughter dance on your lips like bumblebees that spend too much time near the sea because they want to know what it's like to fly along the horizon.

A: But what if I'm afraid to let the laughter in? You see...i'm bad with commitment. I've made some terrible choices in my life that I've got to live with--the kinds that cant ever be remedied, not even with honeysuckle kisses or dancing bumblebees. Not even with the raw touch of the ocean breeze. You could, spend a lifetime trying to convince me otherwise but it won't work. Trust me...I've tried. Cuz when the laughter fades, it'll be me..not you..stuck with the sounds of what could have been haunting my dreams at night.

V: Who's to say that the same ghouls don't haunt my dreams after floating through yours? Maybe I've just made my mind into a river scene that's so beautiful, no one wants to see what's at the bottom of the river, so I don't show them. They don't want to see the twisted curls of metal that have begun to rust or the layers of watery dust that have permeated the cracks of all the baggage I don't want to be carrying anymore.

A: I've swam through enough of these stories-- shallow and deep. I've bent metal bars with bare hands and watched as they dived into river waters just to show her how easy it was to sink. She said she wanted to try it and so we jumped. And that's where she left me. A place where the sun never shines. Where the rain drops get so cold my bones refuse to dance in them. Not because they can't, but because my heart tells them the pain isn't worth dancing for.

V: But sometimes you have to leap into the space between where the air and the ocean meet to feel what it's like to fly. Just for a moment, before you realize that you have to spend an eternity with your wings clipped, feeling the gusts of wind under your feathers but know you can never be free. Those moments of pure exhilaration- those are the ones worth living for.

A: I've found plenty of things worth living for but I have yet to set eyes on something worth dying for. Now I've been told that means I'm not fit to live. But I'm ok with that. You see, I've never seen eye to eye with social normalty. Give me clipped wings and I'll soar to eternity. Distance myself from this world of negativity and flourish...on my own.

V: I have never seen eye to eye with the roles I was supposed to fill. I was too high up in the trees I climbed to be wearing the glass slippers of poor self image that were made to fit my feet. And when I got down to the ground, I was too busy kneeling in the dirt, staring at fallen leaves to slip into the ballgown of feminine grace that has been hanging in my closet behind all my other skeletons ever since. So I grabbed a thicker skin made of out the iron edged gleam I was told appeared in my eyes and asked the goddess of unfulfilled stereotypes to bear with me.

A: I used to think it was destiny. That I was destined to be a hero...catching self esteem suicides that would throw themselves from treetops. I was not their good fortune, I was their miracle. Their second chance to learn how to fly. But all the while I was really just waiting to find that girl with the honeysuckle kiss. They told me she was in need of a hero.

V: Honey sits on her lips because it balances the bitterness that rests on her tongue. She's been tasting it ever since she realized that her hero decided not to give a damn. She became her own hero and her own Atlas, carrying the weight of the world atop her entire spine.