These were the miracles.
The young never
understand
that miracles
come through pain
a baptism
in broken glass
Here I reside
a lone heart's finality
covered in a batch
of old wounds
a thousand puckering mouths
aged shut
pursed in scar
the raw,
unprovoked confessions
of the women
of vengeful lipstick.
They tried to explain
To us
That they were not
The miracle.
We did not listen.
We went on
undeterred, mad
to convince ourselves.
Yes, Yes, they were
the miracle.
The only one we knew.
We'd seen it once
or twice,
firsthand
and spent our lives
trying to reclaim
the moment.
Women are the Muse.
Any of them.
All of them.
And the Muse is
The thing worth
Dying for.
Mar 12, 2014
Mar 12, 2014 at 9:22 PM UTC
The familiar complaints, the cozy ones.
Ambling through the hedges of grievance.
I never know what I'm feeling at any one time.
Usually more of the same. Bragging my inadequacies.
Winter is coughed from the addled coalsmoke sky.
Chimneys chugging ash. Clumps of duress.
Blake's choir of children lying in a heap.
Noontime streetlamps regaled in holly and poinsettia.
A ***** moss enters from the vacant lot, cautiously.
The homeless have been scraped from under the bridge.
Geese call and flee. The snow is flakes of ash,
the sun finally burnt itself down.
Disused meanings are flushed. A carefully wrought
vocabulary we have disabused ourselves of.
Crumbling monologue.
A new grammar forms. Light and Motion dances
from the screen. A panoptican of laughs and serenades.
Sometimes there is a magazine no one has a
subscription to. It is the digest of a human heart
dressed to the nines in thorns and flame.
Mar 7, 2014
Mar 7, 2014 at 7:00 PM UTC
There are thieves, collectors, repo men,
bandits and marauders in the night
trying to take your life away from you
to sell it for a pittance.
You must fight them off with your fiercest guns!
You must ***** the hearts right out of their chests!
The shrieks right out of their throats!
Send them scrambling back into their own darkness!
If something comes to take your life
****** it back with equal terror.
You must stay up, vigilant, keeping a sharp eye
on all you have until the morning
can come again.
Mar 6, 2014
Mar 6, 2014 at 11:33 AM UTC
But I digress. A laughter. Your laughter
unlike any other.
Let’s go on a lovely digression together.
When I see a sentence I like
and when I see a beautiful girl
it’s the same thing.
Your beauty is the best lie there is.
And when you call, you activate the beat
of my heart. Every text is a little defibrillator.
I have no idea what they mean
but they mean everything to me:
The indecipherable smile and eyes you have.
I fall into them
I fall into them
and am never caught.
Feb 11, 2014
Feb 11, 2014 at 10:12 AM UTC
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
I have wasted my life.
Feb 10, 2014
Feb 10, 2014 at 11:25 AM UTC
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
You must change your life.
Feb 10, 2014
Feb 10, 2014 at 11:24 AM UTC
I see you in the park.
I want to look at you.
You want to look at me.
Our eyes ricochet
off each other.
I can't catch you
looking at me.
I can’t even give
a smile to you.
You’re Alcatraz and
I’m swimming to your rocks
and when I get there
you'd rather stay in jail,
kissing the walls.
There is no you. There are a thousand yous.
I know no you. I see 30 yous an hour.
Where are you?
Are you out there?
You’ve got to stay away. You get too close
and you crumble,
or I crumble. Gravity sends
two lives shaking into screws, identities
unable to hold.
But I could know how fragile you are.
How you sit on an iron bench and open
your long, dark lens
to the ultraviolet April blooms.
Shamble into my arms.
I won’t laugh. I promise I won’t laugh.
I’ll break your fall.
It’s my mistake to think
that you’re fragile, that
you’re a flower.
You are a flower, but
flowers are only
advertisements
for the tree.
Flowers fall away early
leaving only the wide, armored waist.
It isn’t you that will crumble.
It’s only me.
Feb 9, 2014
Feb 9, 2014 at 12:21 PM UTC
I don’t know why.
I had you pinned to the bed
and you were finally gonna let me
kiss you. I wanted it to be perfect
so I got up to turn off the TV or
light a candle and I don’t know
what happened but I still haven’t
kissed you and you got married
in April.
The way you looked
at me: ***** and smug,
I haven’t seen anything like it
in years. I’ve subsisted on fumes.
It’s not easy concocting that
in a woman.
I tried to kiss you once before.
We sat on my porch.
You stroked my
hair. I leaned in.
You ducked out of the way
quicker than if I'd
thrown a fastball at your head.
You went back home to the South.
I commemorated my survival
by putting a black X through
each day on the calendar.
Love was finally going to happen to me.
Every day I was getting closer,
or further away,
I'm still not sure which.
I had a lot of dreams about you then.
I wanted them. If I couldn't
have you during the day, I’d make you
visit me in the night.
Once you were wearing
a sweater that gleamed like snow,
my lips touched yours like a bow
on a violin string.
We were both looking for clues,
for God or Fate to tell us what to do.
You crashed your car after you told me
on the phone your friends thought
we should be together forever.
You stopped talking to me after that.
I cried for three days and nights,
but I felt like I should've cried longer.
Tears came all the way from
the tips of my fingers,
the soles of my feet.
That grief was the last time
I knew how to use every part of myself.
I saw you next in a bowling alley.
There was some other guy
you were getting attention from.
He wasn't your boyfriend either.
You were so nice to me
that I knew it was over.
I wondered what God was trying
to tell me and decided He was
******* with me (a bowling alley!)
so I stopped listening altogether.
I haven’t had as much love
(or, more likely, ***
in my life as I planned on.
I’ve withheld reservoirs,
waiting for the right girl,
my energy going into work,
leaking away in various diversions.
Meanwhile, she’s yet to show up.
It’s a hobby of mine,
entertaining suspicions
that she might’ve been you.
Once I sent you a message
saying I’d do anything
to make love to you.
That’s not exactly true,
but that doesn’t make it
a lie either.
I had a dream about you.
Someday my kiss
will land on your lips.
Feb 9, 2014
Feb 9, 2014 at 12:18 PM UTC
I pierce the clouds with light
beneath the print of No. 6
hanging over my mantle
you send your showers down
orange blue yellow
shaking from the canvas
the window becomes
the painting in water and glass
raindrops assuming the yellow
flowers and black leaves
quaking in the wind
we drown into each other
almost breaking from our bodies
we plunge completely
as the violins purple fumes
rise over the room
my favorite part of you
is the little absence
where I can put myself
the drops wrench apart
and bleed down the glass
into the earth
they will never be
what they were before
as red and blue blended are no
longer red and blue but purple
as the blood mixed in our veins
as you mixed in my arms
Feb 9, 2014
Feb 9, 2014 at 12:17 PM UTC