You slipped
away from me,
like the robins and
cherry blossoms when
spring ends,
and the fractured nights
of winter comes.
I will search the
midnight alleys, and the
mountains of Chile.
I will listen for
your sweet laughter.
I long to taste your
honeysuckle lips, and
hear your heartbeat.
If I never find you,
I will be a lost leaf
on the lonesome
vagabond wind.

Look at you my
little bird, have you
been pierced by a
sword?
Are you broken,
afraid?
It fasinates me how
you just. sit there.
Did you forget about
your wings?
The sky is your
home
For **** sake,
take flight.

Frozen clothes on
the clothesline, blowing in
a vagrant wind.
My nose red from the
Wine and beer at
the bar.
December of '87 came
hard and ferocious,
forever changing my life.

I was working night shift at
the nursing home up
the street.
A few of us went to
the tavern after work.
I got home around noon,
and went to bed.
21 years old, with money,
a job, and a car.
I didn't realize
life was borrowed.
Mom couldn't find
her sweater, so she
came to my room and
asked if I had seen it.
I said,
"No Mom, I'm trying to sleep."
I should have realized that
there's plenty of time for
sleep when I die.
But youth produces ignorance,
and I was drowned in it.

Mom asked if she could
borrow my car to go
Christmas shopping.
After more discussion about
her sweater,
I, with eyes closed tight,
held up the keys,
and that was the last
time I saw her.

My last words,
"Quit acting like
a *****."
Ever since, there has
been and itch to
punish myself.
I'm not Freud, but
maybe that's why I
drink so much.
Happy Mother's Day
Mom.

The conversation lasted into the
long tooth hours of the night.
She read her textbooks and then heard a mouse with its tail barely caught in a glue trap. It squealed as if it were dying. In my heart I believed it was savable. In the agony I imagined him dreaming of fields and insects and seeds.
She had these cold gray eyes.
In one quick movement, she took off
one of her clodhoppers and smashed its brains out. She cleaned her shoe with a tissue, she said, I neither hate the mouse nor love it, it's just a thing.  At that moment I was pretty sure she was psychotic.
We're both drunk, I kept watching her *** in that tight  black dress.
She said in a very automated voice, I suppose you want to **** me now and then slithered out of the dress.
***** is *****
But I couldn't do it. I told her to put her clothes back on and not **** anything on the way out.

I was looking for tulips.
I found you, oleander,
deadly nightshade.
Nothing grows in the
darkness that you chose
to live in.
Had I known, I would have
left you to wilt and rot in the sun