There was a susurrus upstairs…


It was the softest ghosts that drove me.
They carried me into town
so I could visit
the Funeral Home Gift Shop.

I weren’t bereaved,
They just have my favorite cokes and
a surprisingly liberal return policy.
The gentleman behind the counter never ends our interactions with, “see you again soon.”
Always just, “Bye… for now.”

It was an awkward ride home.
The softest ghosts still haunt me.

The earth moves around the sun at 67,000 mph.

Since you began reading this
we've travelled 36 miles
through the cold, black void of space

together.

Know then, fellow traveler
that this is why
I love you.

For the millions of miles gone and
the millions still to go
we were, are and will be bound
by this shared vessel.

The void holds tight to its secrets.
I will hold tight
to you.

She has never built sandcastles.
She has never toed the surf along the Gulf of Mexico.
She's only ever known these mountains;
these cold, granite monuments to impassibility
that reduce the sky to slits,
somehow managing to make the heavens smaller.

Half closed eyelids with their own trap-door gravity.

Short lives last eternities too
and there is beauty to be had
- even here -
It's just that everyone should get to build sandcastles sometimes.

People only ever want to ask me about
the poetry -
those verses about
busted up noses in outer space;
about the pros working
way down passed
the corner of Broad and Main;
about fistfights and hard, hard drinking.
But I built a flowerbed this weekend...
Twenty two tastefully irregular stone blocks
in a crescent moon shape,
filled with the blackest of soils.
The sweat of toil.
The digging.
The planting.
Exotic grasses. Asian maybe?
Purple and yellow flowers.
Zinnias or some **** thing.
All covered in a thick blanket of brown mulch.
It's a fine thing to have dirt on your hands
instead of blood.
No one ever asks me about flowerbeds.

Friday
as reminder
of how cruel the time.
(Invariability)
Of how intractable the wind and weather.
(Inevitability)

I cry the cry of the reformed mean spirited;
the once-unholy-then-unholy-again;
the backslid.
It's been so long since I've sinned,
come short of the glory,
come at all (costs)
It would feel good to make a fist again.

Please render me in subtle shades
when you paint me into your masterpiece;
barely discernable from the canvas.
A ghost in achromatic acrylics.

I'm terrified of not having at least one secret that only I know.
Saturn moves into capricorn
as  conqueror
rather than lover.

I keep drawing the tower card.

Space has no boundary.
Down is relative.
We know, then,
that it is entirely possible to
just
keep
falling.
Indefinitely.
Devils roam free in the sixth house.

I've been drawing the tower card.
I keep drawing the tower card.

The snake I am is not the snake I was.

Tower card. Tower card.

"Mama, some pieces are missing from this puzzle."
"Only the piece with the eyes printed on it, baby."

Drawing from memory, now.

Come on and touch
this broken husk
before it crumbles
away to dust, and
something different
is left sitting
at the foot of your bed.

Inevitability.

Might be
that there is no Heaven,
but
there are certainly heavens.