You've been staying rent-free
in my mind for a while now.
Shuffling through my brain
and moving things around,
like it's your right.
You were always like that, after all.
 
At first it was soothing, to
have you rattling about up there.
Thinking I was grounding myself.
Trying to understand you better.
Telling you what I couldn't down here –
the things people say to themselves. 
 
But, years later, I'm still here,
still dragging myself back – only,
struggling to place the face
that's just skulking about,
still taking.
up.
space.

After the rain, the heat breaks and dissipates,
and the air sits lightly on my skin.
There is space for us to breathe.

For some time, our nostrils wistfully recall the
pavement's sweltering heat as fat droplets
hurled themselves to destruction.

Show me the workings of a
world rapt in-news
in-fear
in-side.
What are its mechanics?

What are the mechanics:
a single, sterile globe.
All closing doors,
all shouting to be heard -
engulfed in digital vacuum.

Show me the workings.
Give me something I can touch, something I can taste,
something I can grip
between my teeth and bite down.
Hard. Just to check.

To check the mechanics of navigating the blueprint
of a blueprint
of a home with a sky frozen in a window pane.
The mechanics of a curtain closing.
– there was, in the end, nothing to be done –

Show me the workings.
Lay them out in front of me,
tell me their weight.
Let me know the numbers add up.

Let me know the mechanics of how that scale crests and falls,
heaves and gasps
its decision. Its desperation
to deliver the bodies of evidence in
grams, digits, days, weeks.

I want to see the workings.

Show me the workings.

I think of you on warm summer evenings
when our slowly setting sun coats
dappled oaks in more shades than I can count,
and every leaf is framed in greengold.

I think of you as sleepy wind
lingers in my hair,
strands dancing on a moment,
before laying to rest by a collarbone peak.

I think of you when the warmth settles on my skin
so easily that I see myself
spill out into the dusky air,  
finally weightless.

I think of you.

When evening comes, warm light floods our living room and
bounces off all the quiet angles of your skin.
The rays drink deeply from your pores
as all the gold in the world fills our little home,
and we’re the richest people alive.

But the view's fine from here,
they say, all carbon copy cloying concern.

They don't know that the sun doesn't rise
and set quite so exquisitely
when your sky
is on fire.

But the view's from fine here,
they maintain, as unsaid words skulk in the throat.

They don't notice the skin that burns and crackles
and stretches at a breaking point
that's been broken
for years.

But the view's fine from here,
they confirm. And then turn away.

They don't see what shouldn't be seen,
what eyes can't afford to shut
even as glass splinters
edge closer.

And they are right, really,
because their view truly is fine from here.

#BlackLivesMatter i

I'm trying to get better at sitting with my self
(we’re in this 'til the end, after all).

I'm trying to listen and not judge,
to ask her (kindly) where those thoughts came from.
Whose judgments are being repeated.

It's not that it's a comfortable journey.
She hurls words in poisoned darts,
with wild eyes of blistering flame,
so sure of my faults that
I believe her more than I've believed anything
in our whole life.  

But I know what it's like to be in her body.
So lately I've asked her to sit next to me, quietly,
just for a moment,
just for a pause.

I think it's working.

She's taken to sitting beside me more often these days,
arms wrapped around hunched knees.
She speaks gentler here,
tells me I am scared we are not enough.
But she lets me place a hand on her shoulder,
and remind her: We always have been.

We breathe slowly as we soundlessly observe
the cosmic traffic of shooting neurons.
Of clusters of clusters of memories
and half-said things.

And I'm finding that, after all this time,
I am sitting well with myself.