I see you in the park.
I want to look at you.
You want to look at me.
Our eyes ricochet
off each other.
I can't catch you
looking at me.
I can’t even give
a smile to you.
You’re Alcatraz and
I’m swimming to your rocks
and when I get there
you'd rather stay in jail,
kissing the walls.

There is no you. There are a thousand yous.
I know no you. I see 30 yous an hour.
Where are you?
Are you out there?
You’ve got to stay away. You get too close
and you crumble,
or I crumble. Gravity sends
two lives shaking into screws, identities
unable to hold.

But I could know how fragile you are.
How you sit on an iron bench and open
your long, dark lens
to the ultraviolet April blooms.
Shamble into my arms.
I won’t laugh. I promise I won’t laugh.
I’ll break your fall.

It’s my mistake to think
that you’re fragile, that
you’re a flower.
You are a flower, but
flowers are only
advertisements
for the tree.
Flowers fall away early
leaving only the wide, armored waist.
It isn’t you that will crumble.
It’s only me.

I don’t know why.
I had you pinned to the bed
and you were finally gonna let me
kiss you. I wanted it to be perfect
so I got up to turn off the TV or
light a candle and I don’t know
what happened but I still haven’t
kissed you and you got married
in April.

The way you looked
at me: ***** and smug,
I haven’t seen anything like it
in years. I’ve subsisted on fumes.
It’s not easy concocting that
in a woman.
I tried to kiss you once before.
We sat on my porch.
You stroked my
hair. I leaned in.
You ducked out of the way
quicker than if I'd
thrown a fastball at your head.

You went back home to the South.
I commemorated my survival
by putting a black X through
each day on the calendar.
Love was finally going to happen to me.
Every day I was getting closer,
or further away,
I'm still not sure which.

I had a lot of dreams about you then.
I wanted them. If I couldn't
have you during the day, I’d make you
visit me in the night.
Once you were wearing
a sweater that gleamed like snow,
my lips touched yours like a bow
on a violin string.
We were both looking for clues,
for God or Fate to tell us what to do.
You crashed your car after you told me
on the phone your friends thought
we should be together forever.
You stopped talking to me after that.
I cried for three days and nights,
but I felt like I should've cried longer.
Tears came all the way from
the tips of my fingers,
the soles of my feet.
That grief was the last time
I knew how to use every part of myself.

I saw you next in a bowling alley.
There was some other guy
you were getting attention from.
He wasn't your boyfriend either.
You were so nice to me
that I knew it was over.
I wondered what God was trying
to tell me and decided He was
******* with me (a bowling alley!)
so I stopped listening altogether.

I haven’t had as much love
(or, more likely, ***)
in my life as I planned on.
I’ve withheld reservoirs,
waiting for the right girl,
my energy going into work,
leaking away in various diversions.
Meanwhile, she’s yet to show up.
It’s a hobby of mine,
entertaining suspicions
that she might’ve been you.

Once I sent you a message
saying I’d do anything
to make love to you.
That’s not exactly true,
but that doesn’t make it
a lie either.

I had a dream about you.
Someday my kiss
will land on your lips.

I pierce the clouds with light
beneath the print of No. 6
hanging over my mantle
you send your showers down
orange blue yellow
shaking from the canvas
the window becomes
the painting in water and glass
raindrops assuming the yellow
flowers and black leaves
quaking in the wind
we drown into each other
almost breaking from our bodies
we plunge completely
as the violins purple fumes
rise over the room

my favorite part of you
is the little absence
where I can put myself

the drops wrench apart
and bleed down the glass
into the earth
they will never be
what they were before
as red and blue blended are no
longer red and blue but purple
as the blood mixed in our veins
as you mixed in my arms

A little boy adjusts the boxes
containing the ashes of his grandparents,
squaring the corners
so they are still equal,
so they can still touch.

What kind of man do you require?
A little boy questioning your sleeve?
A wealthy man held together by a suit?
A rolling hog who won't perspire?
Whatever the answer, it's surely moot.

You're no use knowing what you should receive;
Only once given can you know.
There's hungers in us we can't see the source.
It's all well and good holding what you believe
but what you need comes without a choice.

You'd sooner stop the wind to blow
then stop me coming through your door.
I know your blood, I can stem the flow
and if you ask I'll make it roar.

We fall
and fall
and fall
in love
and falling
we grow wings.

All these words
and nothing to say

It's lonely at the top
but it's also lonely
on the bottom

How many years can one spend
not getting anywhere?

Oh God.
I look up and
here I am
in this life again

Surrounded by
the same people
the same walls
the same food
the same words

But I don't want to find it yet.
I don't want to get there yet.
I want to stay lost.
I want to get more lost
so you will come find me.