I trespassed through many lives,
some of them mine,
yours most of all.

Being young
does not excuse,
only shows how long
I've known better.

I thought breaking
was just another way
to change shape.
I mistook leaving
for becoming.

You stayed.
You learned to sleep
on a wet pillow.
I know.
I brought the storm
and called it weather.

You wake.
You endure.
You build a life
where I am a name,
a story you no longer tell.

You rise
like someone who had to.
I vanish,
like someone who chose to.

I see it.
Even now.

And I wonder
what it cost you
to stay kind
to the memory
of me.

I moved it off the porch today,
where sun falls hard and wide.
The *** is cracked, the roots are weak.
Still, something waits inside.

The blooms were bruised, a weathered pink,
like lips that lost their say.
Still, one had cupped the morning rain
and hadn’t looked away.

My back cried out. I crouched and worked,
hard knuckles in the dirt.
I cut the dead, I turned the soil,
poured water where it hurt.

I set it by the cedar rail,
where shade and heat align.
Still stiff. Still sore. You’re gone. That holds.
It’s standing. So am I.

I loved a star that never knew my name,
a silent flame,
fixed in the wreck of night.
Her stillness fooled me
into believing she sang.

She blinked once
in some long-dead century,
and I’ve lived ever since
by ghost light.

They say she's gone,
burned out or broken,
but I keep whispering psalms
to her afterglow,
drinking to the shape she made
in my sky.

I don't need the truth,
just the dream
of her burning.

Like something that waited for me,
not knowing I was too late
the moment I began.

I.
Box fans and mowers drone below,
distant traffic murmurs through summer’s heat.
Memory presses: teeth and old thunder.
Regret. Punishment. Hope. Repeat.

My ears ring with histories,
sometimes cicadas, sometimes sermons,
sometimes her humming, barefoot by the creek,
sometimes the sting of my father’s belt.

Sunlight slants through bloated magnolia leaves,
thick as tongues,
slick with old rain.
It stains the walls with a color like yolk,
like aging joy.

II.
I wake in moonlight,
before the rumble.
Step barefoot onto concrete
still warm from the last sun.

The sky is full of stubborn stars,
hung from the last funeral.
I watch. I wait.
No birds yet. No breeze.
I stay.

I tell myself this is peace.
But the silence knows better.

At lunch I bought a pear,
its shape: a quiet joke.
I cut it clean and slowly,
the blade, the slice, the poke.

It tasted like a breather,
not sweet, just real and right.
Like silence in the stairwell
or breezes late at night.

The afternoon unknotted,
each task a gentler climb.
I fed the cat. I folded shirts.
You’re not here. I’m fine.

Mortgage-bruised pilgrims
linger along Silver Strand,
pop caps against plywood boarding,
edges furred with salt-rust flakes
from storms that chewed the pier.

Seabee retirees
swap tide updates on porch steps;
third-generation surfers
stitch wax into their palms
and still call this south jetty 'church'.

Here my son and I rinsed sand
from our ankles with a garden hose,
him shrieking, laughing, shivering
when cold bit his feet.

I once yelled at him, raging
for dropping keys into surf,
as if that mattered more
than a day of chasing, wrestling in the tide.
He doesn’t remember.
I can’t forget.

Now, he’s taller than me,
vanishing downshore.

I stand outside, voices rise
in the salt-hard wind.
Barbecue smoke drifts
from driveways, tailgates,
settles into dusk-lit lawn chairs.

Boarded bungalows peel to raw board,
splintering porch rails;
nails weep orange along the grain.

A bike frame, chainless,
reddens into memory beside dune grass
still gripping sand.

There is grace in forgetting:
a tide lowers its voice,
sand swallows what was said.

Steel pan in roadside dirt,
just beyond Exit 11: Quartzsite,
sun bouncing off like a flare.

Handle loose, rim dented,
but not ruined;
still whole enough.

It felt like one I swung
at Tomaso’s,
sweating
through the rush,
that night
we plated sixty covers
in under an hour.

Me, this pan,
were used
the way hard things are:
oiled, scrubbed,
flame-kissed and blackened.
Something thick stuck once,
then let go.

I lifted it,
right hand curved
around the handle
as though it never left.
Some things remember you
even when you forget yourself.

I set it in the backseat,
beside the blanket and bag.
thought I’d clean it up,
tighten the handle,
set it on flame,
hang it by a stove again.

I don’t believe in ghosts,
but I believe in steel,
in things that hold the heat
and give it back to you.