i need to stop
setting myself on fire
to keep you warm.

She said “you’re smoking”
I said “you are, too”
She asked me to put it out-
something I could never do

She said “it is snowing”
I said “it is glowing- I am afraid”
She told me to make an angel
before it’s too late

i held you like a rope with no slack,
searing my palms as you pulled away and i held on tight

and when i finally let go
i wondered why the love hurt more than the leave

I was falling
for you

the feeling of
being weightless

the sky and
the ocean are
blue

like your eyes

your eyes and
Einstein’s brain

are the depths
I can never reach

but I will drown trying
to reach either or both

When the
naked branches
blew in
the late
autumn winds,
our love died.
How I long
for the days
of spring,
when all was
alive with
newness.
We lay beneath
the willow tree
and dined on wine,
bread and love.
God,
how I miss you.

When you are a musician
you have every songbird and melody.
When you are a philosopher
you have every question like clockwork.
When you are an artist
you hold every delicate stride and stroke in your soul.
When you are a poet
you have every avidity with words.

When you are a person,
what do you have?

You are twinkling and breaking me apart
I cannot help but stare,
And thank any kind of God
If I had forgotten them before,
All the words now dissolve into my hair and skin
Like salt in the lake I’ve been living in
Underwater and untouched, unopened to anything
They call me home to shore
My body weeps and seeks heat
You gather my limbs like a bouquet
Blooming through your chest and arms

Frost over my hands and feet
Break my fingers off one by one
So I’m reaching for you with saucers devoid of joints
Easily shattered with sharp logic
Only you have read the book before,
And I am usually the one so eloquent and collected,
Falling just short of being bound together

Crash against the surface of my face with a hundred-mile chill
Disappear into the trees again
You are not the forest under elemental pressure,
I have never been the storm
You arrive in me as the devastation
That, laying on my broken spine,
Flooding eyes fracturing the skylight,
I gasp to gather meaning from