The world is a heavy burden
a place that builds you up
with broken bits of brick,
rage, and pain.

The wind carries the names
of those who are to silent
to ever really blame me
for all that we lost.

I rush to write this
memory of truth I found
before it slips my grip
and drips down into
the crypt that carried the few
who left me behind to brood.

I am angry and sad
to see my granddad
discarded at a nursing home.
A diabetic left to die alone
not because he was not loved
but because we all had lives to live.
I forgive all of them
but deny myself that mercy.
On the last day he was alive
he said goodbye
in his own way.
When I said “I loved him”
he weakly replied “thank you.”
Though it was not his intent to,
he made me I feel like I had failed him.
My familial affections
must have seemed like rain
on the desert wind,
brief and rare.
I left him there
and he died.
Frequently,
I wake day or night
with tears in my eye

I am angry and sad
that I saw my grandma wither,
looking like
some small sickly goblin
at the end of her life
because her loved ones
would not let her
let herself die.
They forced her to eat
when she could not leave
that bed where she slept.
While death crept
I kept to myself
to lazy and afraid
to deal with the tension
of arguing with her
about my lack of
her religion.
So, she died
and my anger
simmered inside
as the tears flowed
outside.

I am angry and sad
that I treated my brother so bad.
I was struggling at nineteen
and did not want to see
the mother who hurt me.
So, I avoided him
left him trapped
alone with an abusive
patriarch
to break his heart
and his pain broke mine.
Though he has forgiven me
I cannot let go so easily
and my rage keeps boiling.

I am angry and sad,
made to feel bad,
left seething mad
because I saw
living loved ones
exit my life
beyond the stage lights.
It was their right
but it feels like
their leaving
was saying
that I was not good enough
to keep the ones I loved
in my life.
Black haired girl
left for the Army.
Black haired girl
left our online friendship.
Blond girl
left for her original lover.
One friend gone
then time takes another.
Brown haired girl
moved on to someone better.
How could I not,
I had to let her.
Here my heart breaks again
thought I made a beautiful friend
but it is her turn to leave.

In being left again
I turn my pain and rage within
to disintegrate the one I hate.
I despise those mirror eyes
whom are not good enough
to keep the ones I love.
I long for the day
gray hairs, false teeth,
and wrinkles take me
to a place where no one
can ever leave me again.

Should wedding bells chime in a dream you have, I pray the man,   miming affection     near the altar is not me. I am ragamuffin; a butcher with no cleaver     in his shadow,
instead a bouquet: Clenched in my silhouetted hand flowers turn into torch. I burn     as a filament in a bulb half-expired. I have smoked through my pocket money    in order
to scatter cremated angels from my throat.    I am cloaked by anguish      my grief    poorly sheathed   a tattered nerve. I have only learned        how to praise darkness.

Light is painful as it shimmers against frost: grass gleams in steady growth    discolored
scars healing. Here I am letting out a blood-letter addressed to you, wondering    if I send   a snip     of my own vein will it remind you how     one missing piece    from a whole            can forfeit the future. All any future is:      a motion into the next moment,  its pending indecision none can envision.      We can’t help but revise malleable pasts. Memories flux     rippling water and enough light changes it’s refraction with each new  ripple.        I cannot be a lover if love is not static    humming at least from its hymnal.  

I   write this letter in calligraphy mourning,    like most poets do – rending heart  rendering  this broken universe – with bone and feathered quill. This feather is from my wing, the pair fallible love clipped         the first chance you took to kiss my darkness.

I’m charting learning a path to winter in an opposite sky:
one only I can fly.

On a porch swing that creaks
in the likeness of ancient knees,
I think about the last time we kissed,
how it felt
so much like losing a tooth.

The moon smiles crooked, slanted,
a tilted guillotine
scarring the darkness to blur
the trees that rustle like fluid opals,
fluttering like thousands of white flags.

I was broken before you found me,
a rusted hinge stuck half open
letting anyone trespass. I imagine
you walking up the drive
in your lacey, white blouse:

a ghost of Alice lost in the madhouse
of a world fully armed by spades,
all pointed like a thousand fingers
at your collarbone. You would have
gladly bore their nick for me.

The moon is the Cheshire cat, questioning
why I imagine such things.
A dog barks at nothing down the block.
A rabbit’s outline slinks into a gutter.
Am I crazy to have loved you and sever us?

The moon blinks. We’re all mad here, I think.

I have wasted
too many years
of my young life
wishing I had been
blessed with
a different story.
I am learning
that all life
is precious,
and that each soul
that walks this earth,
is a mere breath,
a simple expression,
of the interwoven
fabric of our universe.
We are each
a ripple in time,
and our aura
radiates energy
that travels faster
than the speed of light.
We are divine beings.
When we possess
this knowledge,
we breach
the edge of certainty,
and begin to understand
that we hold the key
to our everlasting divinity.