You cannot blame me
For when your stomach folds
If you keep coming
To my forlorn tree,
Starving.
Not when the poor man's fruit-bearing bush
Is just the other way
Within the same, short walking distance

She was a thrifted sweater and denim and jersey knit sheets
Pizza breath and red wine and toothpaste
Alabaster skin and knotted hair and freckled shoulders
A tangible dream and my favorite good morning
She agreed to let me kiss her and I agreed to let her slip my shirt over my head before she became
Blood and tears
"I trusted you" and "I’m sorry"
Midnight poems and a drunk "I need you"
I’m afraid I loved you like the way I wrote

I'm going to
Throw our whole book
Into the river
And drown it with my screams

I am going to
Hope
It floats away
With nothing more than ****** streams

I am going to
Jump into the water myself then,
I am going to plummet and pray
That the waves are struck by lightning,
Setting fire to my body, our book,
Both of our dreams.

Have another drink,
Why don't you?
Take another sip?
The bartender's watching us closely but
If I give him a hearty enough tip
He'll leave us be
And we can slip
Down to the train tracks
Like our slurred words.

We won't make love but we'll
Lay on the mercury speckled rails
Singing our heads off,
Drinking some more ail till
The horn blares and
The insides of our eyes pool with gaudy lights from
Heaven above

And we're rolled to bits,
Leaving nothing behind but a trail
Of blood and
The heavenly light of tails.

1 am 06 and
My mother's just called the police on my
Daddy for hitting her in the face
'Cause he didn't like the food today.

1t
Doesn't come as too much of a surprise
They've been yelling all-day
They've been yelling every day.

1 am jotting it
All down in a little notebook, without
Lines because 1 want to practice my
Straight hand.

No one else in
My little 1st-grade class has a mother
Calling the police on their daddy
For hitting their mother in the face.

That is why 1 am special.