Gardner of the invisible

I am a poet
A collector of heavy things.
I pick up the sharp stones people drop and carry them in my pockets until the friction turns them into smooth glass.
I walk with a heavy coat weighted down by the words that everyone else decided to leave behind.
I do not look at a tree and see wood
I see a giant holding its breath waiting for the wind to tell a secret.
I do not look at a scar and see a mistake, I see a map of a place that someone managed to survive.
I see the silver threads in the skin and know they are the stitches of a story.
My mind is a room with no ceiling.
The rain comes in, the stars come in and I sit on the floor trying to find the right name for the way the light hits the dust.
I am always searching for the perfect word to describe the smell of the air right before a storm breaks the heat.
I take the silence that hurts, the kind that sits between two people at a table and I stretch it out into long thin lines until it looks like something beautiful.
I turn the "no" into a "maybe" and the "goodbye" into a song that you can hum when you are lonely.
I spend my days watching the clock not for the time but for the rhythm of the ticking.
I listen to the way the city exhales at night and the way the kettle cries when it’s hot.
Everything is a sign. Everything is a letter addressed to me written in a language
that only the heart can translate.
I am a listener for things that have no tongue.
I hear the pain in a cold cup of coffee the ghost of a person in an empty chair and the way the moon looks like a hole punched into the dark.
I hear the prayer in a child’s shout and the grief in a slamming door.
I do not own the things I touch as much as I own the feelings they leave behind.
I live in the space between what happened
and what we say about it later.
I am the bridge between the thought and the feeling that birthed it.
My hands are always stained with something
Ink or lead or the salt of my own skin.
I stay up when the world is sleeping because the dark makes the thoughts louder.
I wait for the moon to give me permission
to speak about the things that are too bright for the sun to see.
I am a gardener of the invisible.
I plant questions in the dirt and wait for the answers to bloom even if they come up as thorns.
I am not afraid of the weeds or the things that grow in the shadows.
I am a poet because I cannot stay quiet while the world is screaming in color.
I am a poet because my heart is too big for my chest so I spill it onto the page just to make room to breathe again.