I am grey and preluding. I have wounded and wound.
When I see truth I hum closer
Just enough, to swallow it whole.
I am not an angel, only mocking.
The lips of an answer, a plotted confession.
Time has been spent on your alter.
It is beating black, with blue siding. I have looked too long
I think my bloodied knees would know.
Yet flames still flicker and each ember dies over and over.

Now I am a field. A woman standing up,
Searching my corners for what she really is.
Then waving high to the doubts, out to the wines,
and low to the moons.
I see her tears, and take to them.
She thanks me in more cries, and softer verbs.
I am her saviour. Yet she hides too.
Each night it is her morning.
In me she has blown away a young girl, and in me a wiser woman
Gazes towards her day and night, like a new moon.

I wish I could be bigger
fuller than a lemonade glass,
hair waved out,
and nails painted mauve.

If you could see me
for who I've tried to be.
A tongue bitting sweetener
with clean white sheets.

Never a sinking green raft
shooting its last and final flare.
I am all too reserved,
and I am all too stubborn.

But still I've been floating,
going further, on to new,
flares burning brighter,
hair growing longer.

I wave out now to my old home,
returning to myself again.
My nails are painted green,
and I've grown just short of an inch.

With you I am both larger than life,
and steady enough to walk alone.

If we fell together tumbling
for every fist shattered.
Punching holes in ourselves
for every season changed.

We would miss all the breadth
of our own paths travelled.
Tearing apart at the new loves
we didn’t know we made.

When digging our holes
on a strangers grave.

Barely nineteen, he shipped for life.
On a cold windy Pacific shore
carrying relatives?
Old polluted tin cars,
and refugees mailing brown letters;

Silently noted
his lover of his depart.
               One July dawn,
               when the boat calmed.
He knew his biggest regret sailed too.

Later, with new wife and son,
he’d scan the lake for her scooner.
Kawartha grasses grew deeper.
He had a daughter Rosemary,
his past, only a cinematic keeper.

A smirk and a pinch meant “love”.
He ate jam on toast at 7am sharp.
His daughter wore whorish nail polish,
another mistake he’d eventually forgotten.

At Eighty, trembling his hands;
he put on the nights hockey game
        meeting death on a shoot out.
Embracing the warm uncertainty
of the son he left behind.
                     Only to set sail again.

The old rocky mountains
choose to shimmer,
the peaking suns of
my new morning.

Steaming black coffee
sits in his favourite
orange tin mug
always without handle.

On the edges of the
rich green damp tent
I twist apart a newspaper
pulling it to wooden flames.

I breath so deeply in
pulling down to my core.
That I burst out fully
into raw audible sighs.

Reaching parts of me
I’ve forgotten I own.
Peace is not this moment
but this feeling.

The sky today is higher
widening out into wide array.
My love today is stronger,
and this distance is healing.

It’s in a secret folded letter,
in a book somewhere.
Building dust in your,
crusty childhood trauma.

Words like “I’m sorry that
we couldn’t fit together”.
Maybe “I’m sorry that they
didn’t teach you to love better”.

It might say that I just
want you to finally be happy.
You’ll think that’s another one
of my unforgettable darling lies.

But the anger I’ve been feeling
is completely unforgivable.
Making no better reason
to relentlessly forgive.

Seeking lustful validation
is probably my sin.
Seeking your forgiveness
is probably my mistake.

But time is always our cruelist
and truest confessors,
and I have never been betrothed
to anyone, but the truth.