(To Sarah Bernhardt)

How vain and dull this common world must seem
To such a One as thou, who should’st have talked
At Florence with Mirandola, or walked
Through the cool olives of the Academe:
Thou should’st have gathered reeds from a green stream
For Goat-foot Pan’s shrill piping, and have played
With the white girls in that Phaeacian glade
Where grave Odysseus wakened from his dream.

Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay
Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again
Back to this common world so dull and vain,
For thou wert weary of the sunless day,
The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,
The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.

It’s been awhile
Dead light
And
I

Have you been watching
Little me?—
In all my corruption;
Has your sentient ablution—
So tried—
Decided to set me aside
In my hiding?

I grovel here;
Blind.
While You glisten—
You listen—and weave
Serene discomfort
Into a little-soul
Like mine.    

Supine and slight—
I trace Your patterns in the
Night and try to name them
As others have
Before me:
Dipper. Orion. Northern-light:
Compass bright.

Are they suppose to
Mean Something?
I cling to their instruction
And move nowhere.  
Your pictures do not wear the weight
That answers
Do.

Can I sough purpose
In their Recitation?
—For I have wanted for comfort.
I repeat the names—
Cardinal ghosts in dotted-frame—
But their direction
Alludes me.

Oh, You Pin-******—
You Old-Flames—
You Astute Celestial Hosts.  
Have You hung silent
—In all Your knowing
Just waiting
For me to let go?

Do You know the cold of war waged
Alone?——
Blueprints of rage have rewrote the
Geography of my limbs:
I am not my arms my legs I am not
My breaking
Heart.

My hands aren’t mine, anymore.
I have never been so
Stolen.

Hey, Heaven’s map of decussation:
Do You see me down here
at all?
Praying for Your mum
Eureka call——
To pull me past
My boxing halls?

You are all l have left—
to follow.
Tired of feeling lost.
Tired of letting go.

But it could be awhile
      Dead light.
Hopelessness is a heavy might:
But I thought—just maybe,  
you might—
Wait
For me.

I face you
In the night.
—Until I get there.
Me: the tiny nightmare.
At the edge of sleep’s reprieve
Before I face the mourning,
Bare.

My dear,
Me.
Thrumming underneath.
Sobbing.
My sure soft
Heart.
Sleeping between each broken
Part.
Have we waited here
Before?
Swallowed the lock
Afraid of the
Door?
Little one--
You're not so
Small.
Far far more than we might be  
Tall.
Far far more than we're often  
Limited.
Far beyond such simple
Primitive.
Bigger than these boxing
Halls,
Far beyond our fearing
Walls.
Little heart in petal
Glass--
Pink clear water of the
Past--
Listen now, your worried
Heart.
Don't just pull, but simply
Start.
Sorting through the worried
Ends,
Kissing every broken
Bend,
And laugh with every angry
Knot,
Smile because know we ought--
To know no better,
Or be more good.
Listen to right where we
Stood.
And hold it up into the
Light,
Abandon what we fixed as
right.
Abandon notions of
"What"
and
"Might."
And open now, to endless
White.
And healing
Dark,
Trace along each mending
Mark,
And I, sweet me--
Just simply
Start.

If I could speak maybe I would but the water in my ears is
300 degrees and
I am tired of being the peace keeper of people who don’t
Deserve me

The world would kiss my feet but
I chose you
The clouds lick my cheeks but
I chose you
I could know the sun’s brightest eye,
But I chained my throat with
Your gilded promise

I write your good-bye letter over the course of two days.
I started-over seven times—hunched, under the weight.
These worn pages and spilt ink, remember your name-
I hear it softly murmured among their rustling grain-
And as mine fades from the aged oak of your sprawling bed frame--
There is nothing left here for me.

My pen falls as the climbing-cry of cold morning comes,
With a quaking in my wrist, and sharp silence in my gums;
The patchwork quilt is half-hazard, and snaked across the floor-
Where your tremolos dreams had tossed it-the night before,
And only your body’s ghost-imprinted on the mattress-do I look for-
Because there is nothing here left for me.

It’d been fun, I suppose; like Peter and Wendy, infinite and young-
We’d drawn together and merged; then delighted, we had run-
From the duty of daily, the city-those mechanical ghosts scattered among,
And the curtains of riches-in the air, which we’d spun-
Had garnished all of our days; a honeyed veneer of ambient sun!

Yet severe as the prophets-or poor Noah in God’s storm-
In the corners voracious shadows gladly took form
With the slipping lines of your smilem, the lingering chill round the door-
Fall had swept in violent: laughter-dead then, was mercilessly tore-
From our wild-flower wind-pipes, that once inviolable, bore-
Proof of something here left for me.

Now aching, I crease the note crisply and vainly, do try,
Turning it caged, between frail-bird fingers, to descry-
The moment opulence burned, and from the ashes recast-
Mocking imitations: these edacious phantoms! Aghast!
Howbeit! Were we not unassailable then! United, so certain to last--?
Yet just silence, is here left for me.

I don't have all the parts
to rebuild every one of
your burning buildings.

I see you sleeping and
all your whisper weary
age lines disappear.

I don't know how I'm suppose
to pull you from the dark
when you're bleeding.

your ghosts elude me
though to you they're
so cruel and clear.

I don't have the strength to
prevent both our hearts
from bowing.

neith the past
the future
and the insurmountable fear.

I trace the shiny zig zags and
remember that once your
hands were solely for hurting.

memories carved hold an
effervescent  charm
that thickens the air.  

between us is still
but the shadows give way
the predator lurking.

so we'll pack up and
move to where there aren't
faces who stare.

we'll make the most
of it.

Strawberries are kind of like people:

this morning I went to eat some

but their skins were soft and

bruised.

So I cut them open;

laid them on their mushing shell.

I gazed at their perfectly  

pink insides-

and they tasted just fine.