Send them out.
Send them like soldiers to death.
Send them like children to dreams.
Send them like letters to love,
like love to the person you need more than oxygen.
Send them like a better haircut to your sixth grade self
And a message that it will all get better someday.
Send them like parents to orphans,
like a cure for AIDS,
like a last conversation with someone you cannot get back.
Send them out like a gun that takes back bullets.

Fill the wishing jar.
Fill it and put it on the countertop in the kitchen
With the sunlight and the darkness
Just big enough to hold your childhood and small enough to fit Nebraska.
Fill it until it is full

With cash, plane tickets and diamonds,
White picket fences and PTA meetings,
Strong sun and beaches,
The deed to a sunset, a secret door,
Soft skin, sex, the seventh floor apartment,
A perfect body, violence or its end, death and its beginning,
Your own sky, A pregnant belly, the wings to fly and
The music to march you home.

Fill the wishing jar with all you've got and then some
And then run into the front yard
Grab two fists full of soil
And throw them on top

And then wait.

I cannot tell you what it will look like when it grows.
I can tell you mine was a tree with limbs that had hands that would hold yours
And the fruit it bore held seeds shaped like hearts
Meant to be worn on sleeves.
I can tell you what grows here may be more than you can handle
And not what you want by the time you get it
Though you once did.
You hoped for it with heavy lids
And cradled possibility like a stolen child.

My grandmother used to tell me
You can wish in one hand
And shit in the other
And see which fills up faster.
I don't recommend trying it.

Do not let someone else's words work your truth into an illusion.
The greatest visionaries are the ones who see what is not there, but could be, and build it.
The greatest visionaries are the ones who do what everyone says cannot be done.

You are a dreamer
I know because I am a dreamer
And I have seen you
Tied to a kite only you could see,
With a mockingbird sewing your wings back on,
While you argued with a fairy tale to be reasonable.

All our dreams are not rational.
All you can do is know what you know,
And love what you love,
No matter what book, rule, scientist,
Parent, government, teacher,
Friend, religion, -ism, or so called authority
Tells you otherwise.

And learn that things may be as they must be.

Even if your shoes are no more than boxes
They will carry you
Over oceans and into skies if need be
With your dreams tied in a bundle on your back.
They will carry you into the arms of lovers
They will carry you through fires and floods
And they will carry you into valleys where the cactus plants
all have strong arms and boxing gloves and are all trying to take a shot at you.
And they will carry you out again
Injured though you may be.

So you can see your own strength,
Your own worth.
You can take more than you think you can
Like a broken leg, or getting fired, or falling in love again.

The wishing jar is not there to make your wishes come true
It is just there to hold them
Until you do.