The Storyteller

Love the girl who writes stories

Because, her mind is a Spanish bull.

You may not be the matador,

but the red cloth of provocation. 

Sharp black words will live in 

wrinkled creases of bed sheets, and

bite you before you trail off to sleep.

They will wake you with ice water 

when screened sentences she wrote for another 

plays catch with your fragmented fears.

Remember -- writing is a reflex.

She can no more control her word sketches 

then she could control a shiver 

          inspired by a fresh wind

          a pant after an uphill hike

Feel sorry that her brain is being torn to pieces

By carnivorous thoughts trying to take up the most space in her head.

          Kiss her rubbed-dry conscience

          Rub her over-exorcised fingers.  

Ink stains are just blue, blood stains.

You're right, she will never call you perfect

And she doesn't know what it means to let go

She has encyclopedias of people who: pushed her at supermarkets,

          Cut in roller coaster lines

          Overcharged for event parking      

but she can empathize with anything, 

and you could be loved, repeatedly, by sheets of yellow paper --

Her pen heart ejaculating nouns, something so important

          She had to write it down.

You don't need to understand

Her fascination with sound,

Her erotic comprehension for plosives,

Or what it feels like perched in her head,

while seven story-bombs condense on top of each other.

Or worse 

When it's silent,

And the wasteland of her mind makes her dehydrated. 

Love the girl who writes stories

Because her memory is made of bricks

That she never stops stacking.

Yes, her words can be sharp stones,

You're problems could become sheets of paper,

          Arguments immortalized like monuments behind a glass shield,

          You'll never be sorry enough,

She can twist words,

Wiggle through a one-sided situation

You will learn to fear words from her thorny mouth -- beg to be forgiven.

Or you might emerge -- page ruble -- as her heroine's pitiless villain.

but her words could be soft wood,

Warming lover's hands

Feathering flames to feed off your oxygen.

Love the girl who writes stories

Because, she loves you.

and she doesn't do that easily or often.

Don't spend time reading her revisions

Thinking she vacations on shores of past pieces,

Spends the winters revisiting love affairs.

She holds the only key to an expired kingdom.

Crowded with people molded from spoiled milk.

But if you can't love her,

            Scribbling on restaurant menus,

            Glazed over eyes in the middle of a fight,

At least give her some stories and something important to write.