Constant as the fiddle’s hum,
we’ve done it all together, except run.
Fifty years in Appalachia,
we’re cracked leather, aged wine.
My home: the deepening
of our old love and Langer’s lines.
Apr 7, 2019
Apr 7, 2019 at 10:07 AM UTC
There’s a certain clarity in the breakdown:
to really know presence in one moment, is to drown.
These mistakes and this loss are a slipping and a falling,
but panicked stomachs in chests tune our ears to the calling:
Pieces of ourselves that we mourned to have lost, were a giving away:
now we’re shelters from the rain in Soho, and food for seagulls in the bay.
How we protest when we lose our things and our pride,
but lost too was every reason to not forgive (lies!)
Together now, my identity remerges in this task:
I will love you, through the fading of your mask.
Mar 3, 2019
Mar 3, 2019 at 10:24 AM UTC
I misplaced my love
in you,
blame it on my
running away
and these too-big shoes.
I gave myself away
to the crowd,
Found comfort
in being diluted,
drowned out
in this generic loud,
in someone who's proud
of my shape-shifting,
chameleon-tongued sound.
I’ve been responding
to the wrong name.
Lately just
a look of loss
and the chest pressure
of shame.
Beloved mistakes hang
butchered,
in the mirror’s frame.
I found myself
in a pawn shop,
without enough
cents to reclaim.
Mar 3, 2019
Mar 3, 2019 at 10:18 AM UTC
Coffee, ***** sitting:
Drugs abet this ringing in my ears.
All around the universe hums:
Be here, be here, be here.
We seem to think that the past
has a picture of us on its dresser,
and future’s a woman in a red dress;
her womb, our plans: impress her.
Here’s the secret that the birds chirp:
This is the only day.
You made the sky and all the love under it;
you sigh, and the clouds blow away.
Be here with me now, I beg.
Open the door with your whole body.
See me without the past,
and we’ll make love for the first time, always.
Nov 9, 2018
Nov 9, 2018 at 7:20 PM UTC
What a cast of characters
we parade through this play-life,
they're dying Juliet deaths 'til we're bereft,
pondering the qualities of the stage light:
how it caresses empty sets with as much grace as our dramas,
unrequited in its love of the playwright.
Jul 7, 2018
Jul 7, 2018 at 6:46 PM UTC
I hold the feather’s weight of your artery in my pick-ups,
and tiptoe the tightrope about which life and death abuts.
You’re a 2 AM trauma and we still don’t know your name,
the social worker’s thin lips had mouthed: “estranged.”
I read your anatomy like a text as you flat-line:
your hands turn blue as your heart falls still in mine.
The monitor hums "out of time," but by Epinephrine,
and Grace, your chest resumes its rise.
I leave trauma bay in prayer: for the surviving, not the knife;
for the closeness of my hands in your chest, our joining in this life.
Tonight I see you at the Kroger, buying TV dinners and beer.
I hide behind cereal, admiring the life I’d held dear.
But you look so tired, and my heart breaks for how when you died,
I would’ve sold the shoes off my feet to buy you more time.
I wish you knew how precious was each of your heartbeats,
I wish you the wisdom of my view:
How fragile the stent is where your veins meet.
Apr 5, 2018
Apr 5, 2018 at 7:32 PM UTC
I've taken up writing biographies,
but I'm starting at the end.
See I'll write us back to eighteen,
full of freedom and backseat heartbeats.
I'd write us back to twelve,
and tree house book pages turning.
See I'd write you wild, child.
I'd write you blanket forts,
chances to consent,
and that lion heart
that was yours
when you were barefoot.
Mar 25, 2018
Mar 25, 2018 at 10:16 PM UTC
It’s been months, love,
and you’re far, and have someone new,
but I’ve been dancing all this time,
in our living room, with you.
Even this Cohen record tires,
of playing this song you loved most,
but I swear I feel your hands in my hair,
and you make a handsome ghost.
And I know that this glow is your tail lights,
but I love how it bathes your skin.
I’ve missed all these meals waiting,
so I’ll have my white dress taken in.
Give me a few hours, to tape my face on,
to my bones, my heart: our plans;
truth is, while you were saying goodbye,
I was memorizing your hands.
I hope you don’t mind living this double life,
because I need just little more time,
and if all I have is your absence,
that’s fine.
Mar 8, 2018
Mar 8, 2018 at 11:31 AM UTC
We are laid to rest here,
river-weathered into perfect spheres,
our egos lowered into earth,
we are infant, wet with birth.
We leave our shame, our names, our bones,
at the depths of these erected stones.
In this soil our fears are buried,
the worms find feast in what we've carried.
We learn to walk as Taps plays,
unsteady on newborn legs, we walk away.
In spite of different thoughts on God and verse,
we arrive in the same struggled hearse.
Our lives, the procession to this funeral,
we are one, reborn from clay and mineral.
Feb 10, 2018
Feb 10, 2018 at 4:38 PM UTC
I dreamt that gravity
was just a conspiracy
to sell us shoes
but we never questioned it
just stood, penniless on blistered feet
gazing at the stars
Rage, riot-
wage war against the mind-cage
I dreamt I was an infant
who never learned
that my outstretched hands
were mine, were 'I,'
they tried to bathe me but
I swirled down the drain
and became the sea
Wail, weep-
sell your soul to the keeper of the mind-cage
I awoke with this migraine
shook my head and
heard the shackles clink
reached up and felt
this fissure in my skull
pried it open, watched my mind sigh
and expand to fill this space
Grow quiet, shake hands-
have a cup of tea with the mind-cage
Now I am creation
took the roof off my house
I waft into the open sky
opened my heart
clowns from a clown car
the sorrows walked out
Embrace, make peace-
just be with the mind-cage
Weightless, I meet my old desires
fluffy little wishes floating in the breeze
but there is nothing lacking now
I hold the mind-cage in my arms
we float as it screams
and blames, and fades
Slither, creep-
escape through the open bars
Come home to this joy
Jan 17, 2018
Jan 17, 2018 at 12:16 PM UTC