Pour another
Gin and T!
Soak in the din.
Sins sung phase into crescendo,
laughs leave our chests and wallets open.
It's just alcohol for dinner, tonight.
What? No lime!

God, I thought I was grown up.

A row of empty tables;
Tables set for two,
Two crystal cups, a candle,
Everything but you.

An almost vacant restaurant
An hour from the close
With gentle scraping cutlery
And everything but you -

Oh, what awareness that it brings
Of each person born alone
To live alone,
To die alone,
To wait, and sit and chew.

A row of empty tables,
But I’m filling in the view
And the waiter takes the rest away -
Everything but you.

I can't get dressed and
I don't wanna run
Or do the things that
Get me to the Human gold standard.
I just want someone
To pluck me off of the floor,
Towel and all,
And dance with me.

You are commanding the presence of an audience of children
Who do not, for a couple of hours, feel like children.
They feel like lightning bolts, and lovers,
Congregates of "The Broken Axe Handle",
Even if they hardly show it.
You’re telling them their own story
For which they haven’t yet learned how to form the words.

And after it all,
The crowd moving in a waking dream cloud,
You come into my focus,
And you practically whisper, “Seeing you there, you made me feel
Centered”
And I felt humbled by the honesty.
What a surprise to have such a weighted job!  
How impossible it is to take crumb of credit
For the beauty of your poetry!
I, entirely teenaged with endogenous anonymity,
Someone’s fulcrum!  

In a decade since,
I, (un)entirely grown and still ontologically unknown,
Still live your language,
Still aim to be the rock or
The hook on which to hang a hat.
Even when I don’t think I can
Even when I don’t know I am,
You make me feel daily that
In just receiving someone’s truth,
Eyes up,
I can make the return to be
Someone’s somebody.

He called me, “Assassin,”
And peered into my piercing blues.
                     I called him “Collateral damage,”
                     And watched my mark maunder blindly out the door.

Grasp and
Grasp and
Grasp desperate to interlace hands,
Fingers falling through like sand.
A gust, and gone.
So frail you were at the end,
And yet so free.

If I had known that twenty-six
Would look so much like thirteen,
I would have kept at least one
Elastic training bra to
Remind me I’m better at
Working under the wire now.

You cannot realize dreams solely from your strife in life ;
But can you make them immortal in graves - yours, mine?
A weakened, timorous, coward beast am I
Who made a fleeting choice only to watch the laid way
Unravel.

No, I shall not run amok.
No, I shall not waste your time.
No, I have had the power all along to leave you
But I stay.

If you are going to shoot,
Shoot me between the eyes.
Meld two gazes together so that when you reach Eden
You bring my sight.
I deserve to crest the horizon, too.  

By George, my hands are large,
They err, they wring,
And perhaps they hold the worst parts of you
Or the long-sung song of some childhood gone by.
But, at least give me a fighting chance to
Bend the barrel.

Sometimes it just strikes you in the gut,
A flash of a face smiling
Then dashed, red, fear –
An intrusive thought, a grief paralysis
At breakfast, in line at the store, waiting for that phone call
When he took just a little too long coming home,
When you send her on the bus,
When they kneel down for one moment of prayer.  

Maybe you never see it you just feel it
Maybe one hundred and fifty times a year,
Maybe twenty-six times a day,
diffuse, like an throb radiating outwards,
like a ghost,
like a seven-year heartache.

Maybe you stopped feeling it, you just see it
In black and white
In colors that you know matter, but you
Choke on your own descriptions (what a privilege!),
And the world chokes on the words that would
Shake you up and wake you.  
When you were given the right to bear something
it wasn't to bear witness to a waking nightmare.
But if you’re sleeping with earplugs
You’re never going to open your eyes.

Oh how unjust and uncalled!
She wipes the muck from her mask.
Words fly fast from a gunnysack.  
The challenge is not to sling back!

When they came down from their disk
With their blinding lights
And their alloy ramps
It quickly became obvious
Unexpectedly, in our hubris,
That they wished only to
Gas up,
Take some pictures of squirrels
And stretch their limbs
Before setting out toward a finer frontier.

I once pitched wishes
Up to stars that listen as well as stars can hear.
My wishes were well crafted plans
Bounding faster and faster and faster
Through a void that cares as well as voids can care.

I’ve noticed just the way
you’ve got this spotty patchwork over the bridge of your nose,
Restless eyes, and try-hard hands.
And I’ve noticed that you’ve noticed that I’m noticing.  
Your attention could mean nothing.
Your affection could mean everything.
Could I crack you open as much as I please?
Bit by skeletal bit by interstellar bit?  
Could I query the fragments for a lifespan
And would they yield, and yield something new each time?

I’d like never to cast another wish
To those gaseous lights bearing hopeless charges into a space
Unfeeling, unfathomed, undone.
I’ll ditch those stars above that never have a thing to say,
because you’ve got your heart upon your sleeve,
the biggest ears I’ve ever seen, and
Orion’s belt written straight across your face.

I've gotten so used to blowing past
red flags like
green lights,
I've forgotten what to do
when it's the right way around.

If I didn’t know any better,
I would say the light of the world
Pours out of the wide whites of your eyes,
And thunder is your belly-laugh bellow.
You are category five chaos
Giving me windfalls in my day.
If I didn’t know any better,
You just blow right on through
Just for you,
But it’s the seizure of my wrist into
Oh, this – ah here – oh that!
Door hinges revolt at the speed of this revolution,
The sidewalks remember our favorite tread.  
You are a gale and a lee,
You force me to be me.

Could you repeat that?
It’s just that the white-water cascade is drowning
Your words before I get the chance to process –
What precisely do you mean
When you say this is perfect,
The perfect idea and
The perfect spot
On the edge of
Something so
right and good
That it kills,
But it’s
"Too
bad"?

Sister, eyes so blue,
Full to the brim with crying.
Sister, your mind’s true
To a heart always vying
To render it from lying.

Timpanic membrane mumbles transform into
Crescendoes, dumb  except   within skull walls.
Not quite like a burn, not quite like a sting this
din deigns to drag out old heartaches and new
failures and fresh ideas and stale aspirations but
stuck in staccato can any one idea stay  or   are
they doomed to rattle, to deafen?  They come
and go and is the thought  even  finished  with
these streams  of   consciousness  up  against
dull  tasks,  wasting  commands  and  ­all  these
commands waste so much energy. When I just
want the world to  stand  still  is  there any
one – yes it is                                 who  weaves
back in and               YOU                 that resonates
in overtones.                                 have made the
mental madness manageable when  you quietly
                          stop the leaking gap.
A plane on which to  balance.  A  grip  with   which
to bolster stronger blisters.
                            A quieting yes to block out
out the trembling timbre.
You are order out of chaos.

In the evening’s repose,
My silent film dreams
honor you, and
in the morning
I wake to noiselessness
and a thunderous heart