I wake up without you
Lying away from me won't solve your problems
Not even on your cold asphalt bed
Your mechanical graveyard covers twisted tight around you

Rain rinses your wounds
The blood is washed away
A river flowing into my room
I don't recognize you, sitting in the corner

Watch my chest heave with silent sobs
Picturing your gnarled face
I don't sleep
I go to bed with you still gone

I realize that the time we have won’t be enough.
If you add all the moments up....
You have a lifetime that flashed by in the blink of an eye.
& Maybe if I can count all our moments together...
Instead I will have an eternity to share.
Today, I am 23 and tomorrow I shall be flowers arising.
I clench and whisper to myself to remember every detail.
Feeling the moments slipping.
As the way life arises into consciousness & then out to oblivion.
I am reminded that all of myself is only the parts in which I can recollect.
My mind the only bridge from meaningful to meaningless.
I pinch my crisp blue jeans in hopes that I can still feel that I exist.
I can feel my unmanicured nails piercing my skin through my jeans.
All in hopes of penetrating the impermanence nature of this moment.
The hourglass drips a grain of sand at a time.
Yet, it only takes a second for a desert to form.
Maybe on the edge of the world standing upon a desert I can find solace. 
Finding comfort instead of fear about where I end and the infinite begins.

you are not someone i can bury myself beneath.
you are someone i am meant to forget.
disappearing like dew in the morning,
you are not art, as much as i say you are.

The pen is unforgiving of mistakes
Its marks are long lasting
I can’t erase you... only scratch through parts
This story of us will always be there
Written in ink as a complete work

When I draw a beautiful picture though
I use a pencil so that I can change it as I go
Erase this part and add my shading there
Pencil on paper is fragile it smudges easily
You are art... not perfect but gorgeous to me

I appreciate both for what they are
And what they mean to me

I sit thinking a little faster than the speed of penning, thereby having to repeatedly press pause on my thoughts to let the ball of blue catch up with the image / the sound of the phrase in my mind / on my quiet tongue that flows fast down my right arm into my slow fingers and out into the ball point that hits the page with part-satisfied impatience

And in that pause, resisting the urge to edit / to revise / to reform the original thought that is crying out to become embedded in the page / begging to be seen / to be loved and so to sit and to stare back at its origin, safe in the curated space to stay / to settle and perhaps to become part of something bigger / longer / older, something of possibly permanent beauty.

And having gotten over that feint-ruled line, my first thoughts face the risk of being transposed / transformed by typing thumbs before becoming something that will last on a plain white screen and later be posted at the speed of competing broad bands into a world wide cloud of words.

Later, having hovered / waited, my wet words just might find a place to soak / to stain / to marinate and later be memorised perchance recitied at a more appropriate speed within a crowd of like-minded minds and perhaps for a phrase to lodge / to be recalled / to form part of something that fate redirects through a ball of blue, back out into the flow.

“Til the rocks melt with the sun;”
Is that how long love goes on,
Beyond the trappings of time and the outer contours of the mind?

I learned of love within the cadence of Celtic songs.
Daddy played them on an old piano
And mommy sang along.
The walls they rang with something that wasn’t
Really so hard to understand;

The aching of one heart for another,
Always swept apart by the sea
And the way a lifetime
Can make it too far to reach
The other, distant shore.

But the sorrow at the core of Highland songs,
I understand better now;  
Now that every tangible thing from those years
Is gone,
Their voices silenced and a home knocked down,
Lullabies buried in the ground.
The piano sold and gravestones too far away for me to hold,

But love, love is the Moorland in my soul

And it is wide and open
And the purple heather grows
Forever and descends to a churning sea,
And melodies, on the wind, they whip between the rocks and disappear.

And though I can no more grasp voices from the air
Than hold love here,
I will stand on this shore and I will sing these

Forgotten refrains

And though they drift across the sea,
This love has been worth it all the while,
Even if time carries it away,

Like music,

And it never comes back to me,

Depression does not have object permanence,
Or it would know
That happiness is merely
Hiding.

I’m always grasping. Trying to retain some form. Painfully and desperately, I try to keep it, shape it, define it into permanence.

This longing for certainty, this anxiety and desire to be— like the statues unmoving, named and certain— to be something I know, forever, and ever and ever.

But our splendor is in our changing, in our ever shifting consciousness. The heart floods and becomes empty again. The breeze of autumn. The hot of summer. My blood on the rocks. The wound tender in infection. The scar I touch like a feather.

We are made in God’s knowing of ephemera, ever changing, ever fleeting. Undefined, and ephemeral forever, ever and ever.