i thought of her when
i prayed you would change one day
did you break her, too?


a.m.

You held my hand.

While Andy Dufresne crawled through a river of **** and came out clean on the other side, you willed your fingers to find mine.

I wanted to tease you, “don’t play palm reader, i don’t think there’s a rosetta stone for untangling this mess”,

But I didn’t.

Instead, I let your thumb make maps of me, charting my mountains and valleys and taking inventory of the cracks you could gently crawl your way into.

I wanted to say, “it’s dark down there, don’t let yourself get lost because I’m not sure that you’ll find your way back out again, and trust me, it’s no place to make a home”,

But I didn’t.

Instead, I let your fingers ****, where does it ache? Where are the fault lines that just won’t give? Where are there fires waiting to ignite?

I wanted to explain, “the fires inside of me aren’t something to roast marshmallows around. These fires destroy towns, burn whole cities right to the ground”

But I didn’t.

Instead, I watched your fingertips search for mine like kindling, wondered if you touched the stove one too many times as a child, wondered if maybe you weren’t afraid of getting burned.


I wanted to be honest, “I don’t know how to write love anymore, my hands don’t know **** about soft, only know how to etch in my notepad with splintered bone and blood”,

But I didn’t.

Instead, I let myself melt into the laughter that followed a joke you so cunningly told. And suddenly, poetry felt more softened butter and less barbed wire.

I wanted to warn you, “they shake sometimes. These hands are more bull than butterfly most days, tend to do more breaking than building”,

But I didn’t.

Instead, I steadied myself in your breathing. Let your heartbeat echo in my ear and decided that I would never, could never, make a china shop of your chest.

I wanted to give you one more word of caution, “I’ve waded in my fair share of ****** rivers, thought about drowning myself in them a time or two to put out the flames, I understand if this is too much, if you’re already taking on enough water of your own”,

But I didn’t.

Instead, I wanted to tell you what I was thinking, that maybe, you’d trudged the same waters, wondering if somehow we’d both come out the other side clean. calloused and cracked, but clean.

But I didn’t.

I wanted to ask, “can you be patient? no one’s ever treated my fists like teacups, I don’t know gentle. But I can learn. You can teach me.”

Instead, I didn’t say much. We watched Andy Dufresne make a free man of himself, tasted salt on our tongues from the tears or the ocean, some relief from the dry mouth the *** so lovingly gave to us, felt the sun on our faces and hoped the Pacific was bluer than either of us could have ever dreamed.

And you held my hand.

And somewhere along the way, I found myself holding yours, too.



a.m.

Eventually,
We all get older.
We wake up and find ourselves standing on the precipice of adult.
We brace our bodies for the shift that’s sure to come,
The jump, the free fall,
The swan dive into the gatekept world of grown ups,
Where we’ve been barred out for long enough.
Countless hours spent building up dreamscapes
of getting out
And growing up
And getting rich
Or famous
Or beautiful.
Or brilliant.
We go reckless and proud and headfirst into ice cream for dinner
And socks that exist only in pairs
And questionable bedtimes
And bad decisions
And for the briefest and sweetest of moments we think,
By golly, I’ve made it.

Eventually,
We all get older.
The evidence of our ice cream dinners shows up on our hips
and thighs,
Our bodies betray our most private moments,
Shouting out to any passerby,
“I’ve had six pints of ben and jerry’s just this week!
I haven’t used my gym membership in well over a year
and at this point, i’m afraid to go in to cancel it!”
And, seriously, what is up with the sock thing?
Does my dryer consume socks?
Like, if my dryer doesn’t maintain a steady diet of socks,
Will it starve?
Will it explode?
Will it go on strike and recruit my washer to join in the fighting of the good fight?
Who do I call when my laundry appliances spin cycle their way into civil unrest?
A sacrificial sock here and there is better than the alternative,
I suppose,
Because I sure as **** can’t afford a new appliance,
let alone two,
And also, at what point do i start to feel like I can comfortably afford a new appliance?
Is it when I stop throwing money at a gym membership that i haven’t used in like, twelve-plus months,
or does that come some other time?
And why is it that anymore, by 9:30 every night,
My body starts to feel its own weight
all at once,
It’s as if I couldn’t remain upright if my life depended on it.
Is that because, for the last fifteen months, I have poured my hard-earned dollars into a gym membership that I have used
not one time in,
coincidentally,
the last fifteen months?
Like, all jokes aside,
why would we,
As an ever-evolving, self-aware, species
Continue to dish out nearly twenty U.S. dollars a month
Fifteen separate times
For a gym membership that we are obviously
Never going to use again?
And just like that,
It is so
Clear.
You have no ******* idea what you are doing.

Eventually,
We all get older.
We come to accept that more often than not,
Days will be bookended by more questions than answers.
If we’re lucky,
We might find ourselves learning to lean into the gray spaces,
the precariousness of it all,
Instead of trying to stain it peachy.
To find a quiet corner in the static,
To let the strangeness that be wrap itself around you,
Is a feeling that I suspect only an elite few ever get really good at.
To those of us who still try,
To those of you who are still trying,
Take pride in the practice.
No one gets good at being comfortable in the gray on their first try.
For some, it takes a lifetime.
For others, lifetimes.
But from what i’ve been told,
It’s well worth the waiting for.

Eventually,
We all get older.
Yes, even the mamaws and the willow trees
and the baby brothers
the first grade teachers, too,
and the cicada who met your acquaintance that one summer afternoon all those years ago.
The dads, the best dogs, the single moms,
Yup, they all get older, too, eventually.
As we all do.
When they go,
(we all go, you know, eventually)
we remember them for their windchime giggles
or you find them in the way you still brush your hair,
Just how they taught you.
People tend to leave breadcrumbs of themselves all over the place.
If you pay enough attention,
You can find them **** near anywhere.
You have your mother’s eyes, for example,
Or so you’ve been told,
A hereditary heirloom from her to you.
Even if you never could quite see the resemblance.
but lately, you’ve noticed,
There is a familiar sort of something there,
In your own lookalike set,
You can just barely, almost, make it out
When you tie your hair back and tilt your head just so.
It comes most clearly in the mirror after the kind of day
you don’t want to talk about.
When being has broken you down,
There’s a skepticism,
or a longing maybe.
You’ve seen this somewhere before, have you not?
A daydream perhaps?
A long-forgotten dandelion wish
or a memory dislodged?
You’re still working out the logistics, the linguistics of it,
But you saw this, once upon a time,
Took note of it,
Came to know it well, you think,
Certainly it must have existed in your mother’s eyes,
must’ve because,
It’s a familiar sort of something.
You first remember it way back when,
Yes, that’s it,
Something from way back
when all you wanted to know was what it meant to be her,
To be big,
To be grown up.
Peculiar, though, isn’t it?
it seems such a juvenile sort of something now,
Looking at it from way up here,
Seeing it in your own reflection for the first time,
Does it not?
Big, grown.
An adolescent sort of uncertainty, possibly,
Or -- no, that’s not quite it,
Childlike wonder, it must be,
In her eyes and yours.
Proof, I suppose,
That eventually,
we all get older.
And maybe it’s presumptuous to assume,
But one can’t help but wonder,
Aren’t we all just grown up kids?
Aren’t we all making it up as we go
and filling in the gaps with the cadence of a child,
Your mother must’ve, too, i’d guess,
with that sort of something in her eyes.
Aren’t we all stumbling, scrambling, doing our best to scrape by,
Praying to the dryer gods that our **** doesn’t break,
And if it does,
We cross our fingers for the tragic death of an imaginary, estranged, great-uncle who just so happens to have acquired a hefty sum of money throughout his life and, well,
i’ll be ******,
If he didn’t make you his beneficiary! Stranger things have happened here, have they not?
Aren’t we all just trying to understand?
ourselves?
and people?
and god and grief and bliss and sickness and marriage and death, hope and money, how the defrost works, and what it is about karma that makes her such a ***** and what it means to be a good person, anyways, and taxes and laundry and which drugs are must-trys and which are don’t-evers and when drinking is considered to be a “problem” and how people can push THAT out of THERE and the art of loving and the arguably more advanced art of being loved and forgiveness and success and desire and *** and stick shifts and the beauty of a deep breath?
Aren’t we all lost out here?
Aren’t we all scared out of our minds?
A bunch of grown up kids, really.
A ragtag group of misfits, try-hards, have-beens, and never-weres.

Eventually,
We all get older
Except those of us who don’t, I suppose.
I’d venture that we’re all still trying to figure out how to understand that, too.
We get older, just the same, as one does,
our hips get wider and our dryers get nicer, newer.
Teenage girls seem to get ever-prettier, the rich get richer,
cruelty gets more cunning and the planet gets sicker.
We get far more than we bargained for or
Far less than we deserve,
We get busy living and dying in tangent,
love gets stronger, scarier,
and we keep the faith that some day,
Somehow, love will get simpler, sweeter,
and time, as it does, gets on with itself,
despite it all.
In spite of it all.
And, as we do, we get older.
And still,
we have no ******* clue what we are doing.
If we’re being really honest here,
We understand not one ******* thing about whatever this is,
And I’m not fully convinced that we even want to know.

So, we let ourselves be small in big bodies.
We eat ice cream for dinner to remind our little selves that there is joy in the forbidden, the unpredictable, and the delicious.
We approach socks with reckless abandon,
pair a tall christmas
With a no-show pineapple-speckled grey,
We take on every decision with the impulsivity of a tiny human who,
Roughly and at best,
Has six years of life experience under their belt,
Skipped their afternoon nap,
and has developed an apparent affinity for shotty judgement calls,
We’ll apologize for it later.
And it’s true of most of us,
I’d think,
That we hope for a day somewhere down the line,
when we’re a little older,
A little wiser,
A little bit in a position in which we can comfortably afford a new dryer should we need to,
We wait for the day when we’ll wake up, as normal a morning as any,
And it’ll hit us:
By golly, i’ve made it.

The truth, i think, is that so few ever actually do.
Make it, I mean,
Whatever that is for you.
We hang on to our hope and convince ourselves we’re satisfied,
Or that we’re better off now than when we started.
Maybe we are.
But if you ask me?
I don’t think it matters.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at my mom’s eyes in my own reflection.
I’ve asked all the questions,
Looked hard for a clue or a compass to point me to
Where i’m supposed to be going,
What it all means,
Who to trust
What to expect out of a person,
What people expect out of me,
Where to go to find lost souls,
Where I fit into the grand scheme,
And like, what even is this whole “grand scheme” thing anyways?
All this to say,
I don’t think she knows any better than I do anyhow.
Or than her mom before her.
Grown up kids, you know?
Little people in big bodies.
Every last one of us.
Growing up
And getting older
and getting the **** out of dodge
before we have a chance to catch up with ourselves.
I think it's the best way, truth be told.
But who’s to say, really?
I, for one,
Have no ******* idea what i am doing,
And if I was the gambling kind,
I’d bet my bottom dollar that you don’t have a ******* clue,
either.
We’re all just figuring it out, aren’t we?
Grown up kids, that’s all.
Little people in big bodies,
Just making it up as we go.



a.m.

My poetry has never been soft,
It’s all etched and carved
And written in blood
It’s the grit and tar of this life
It’s the hope that if it lives on my page
it will no longer live in me.

This, I know how to write.
I know how to metaphorically catastrophize my existence
Into stardust and shudders.
I know how to write my pain pretty,
Doll it up,
Deck it out,
I can make this **** beautiful enough to take home a miss america title.

But you?

I don't know how to write you.

You’re all
Soft voices and 4 am kisses
And touches and cassette tapes
And i can’t write that with a pocket knife.
How can i write so delicately the way you calm my insides?
How can i write gently how my mind was a polluted cesspit until you planted flowers in it?
Maybe this isn’t some meadow in the sunshine
Maybe it isn’t all that smooth
Or simple
But I’m finding that the bleakest corners of my mind
Are much brighter,
More beautiful,
With you in them.
And I simply don’t know how to write that.
And for once -- I’m grateful for the writers block.
It means that this is easy.
Peaceful.
Loving.
Certain.
Genuine.
Kind.
It’s all I want in this world and it’s all that I don’t know how to turn into prose.
I hope this will suffice.


a.m.

I wish I’d met you in a different lifetime
further down the line.
In this hypothetical lifetime,
we’re stronger and smarter, quicker on our feet,
Full of grace and thought, ready for anything.
a life quite close the end of it all, perhaps,
When we’ve learned just about all the lessons
Conquered almost all the demons
When we’ve found ourselves **** near the best that souls can be,
So close to eternal bliss we can almost wrap ourselves in it.
I wish you had found me a bit more evolved,
A life in which we’ve found a perfect niche for our respective selves,
We could spend these long days on our own cosmic plane,
Sipping herbal tea and
contemplating the complexities
Or the simplicities
Of it all
where we go from here,
And how it could be possible that we fit so nicely into one another's
Grand schemes,
How lucky it is that we found each other just in time
For the end of our journeys, whole and full.
I wish we could spend these moments in peace,
Where we can count our combined spirals and
questionable decisions
And painful memories on one steady hand,
Where we don’t have to weigh
Who needs more in the moment,
Where we don’t have to fight so hard for happy,
And we wouldn’t have to white-knuckle it when we have finally get a momentary taste.

It’d be nice,
Wouldn’t it?
To love and let love
To know the answers and let the questions
Roll over us without a care,
Without getting stuck there?
To just enjoy what the universe has made of us?

But then again,
on second thought,
I think I’m quite glad you’re here, now,
Somehow,
Maybe this is lucky.
Maybe lost and hurt
and ages away from where we’re meant to be,
Unsure and certain that we must missing some essential thing,
Something everyone we admire seems to have found,
Something they keep tucked away for only the elite to know,
Some compass or map
Or fountain of youth
Or maybe we just haven’t read the right books
Heard the right songs
Gotten the right diagnoses
Had the right conversations
Visited the right places.
Regardless, I think,
This lifetime must have been meant for us.
Maybe,
I think,
I don’t so much mind the white-knuckling and
Trying to understand and
Asking too many questions
And tallying up the ones that are ever-unanswered
As long as you’re doing it next to me.
The getting there, i’m beginning to think,
might be when we need one another most.

a.m.

Our mornings nearly always unfold in the same way.
We reserve those initial hours
for stretching out muscles and moments.
we turn on slowly,
these tickers are getting older every day,
It seems,
our engines don’t turn like they used to
it’s a sputtering sort of process
A stop-and-go kind of thing
Slow
Steady.
Reliable.

Old souls in young bodies, one might say.
Our aches and ailments aren’t all that bad,
Our muscles haven’t knotted and we haven’t grown frail,
At least not quite yet, anyways.

Oh, but our souls?
These ol’ things?

They take some time to get going,
They need a little warming up before we can --
well, before we can really do a **** thing,
Just enough time to ignite the fires in our respective bellies,
And to settle into the heat.

And we’ve got it down to a science.

It starts in the toes.
Yours find mine,
Or mine yours,
And I ease into knowing that you and i got lucky,
Maybe the only luck we’ll ever have
or at least the very best of what we’ll ever see of it,
How fortunate it is to find the body that holds the soul
That wakes yours gently, slowly…
i digress.

Next goes the hands,
To the hair
Or the face
Then comes the muscles through our backs, shoulders,
We get reacquainted with sunshine and song birds.
We adjust.
Adjust the blanket, the pillows,
Adjust our schedules
(10 more minutes, we won’t be late)
Adjust our bones, our bodies,
Our expectations.
We take our time
tweaking and turning ourselves into the type of people who
Get dressed and
Brush their teeth and
Socialize and
Go to the bank and
The grocery store and
Reply to emails and
Call their moms and
Pay their bills and
Clock into work on time and
Get through work without crying and
Remember to take their meds and
And oh, god, okay, fine,
Five more minutes, i digress.

Finally
we lean into the weight of the world and take it on in pieces. A slow drip. A toe in the water, then the leg.
Two tortoises in a hare race,
We know how to conserve the stamina we’ve got.
We know we’ll thank ourselves for it in the long run.
So, our mornings go slow.
Steady.

Some mornings are an easier start-up than others.
Sometimes the rain aches deep in our chests.
Or the late night slips sandbags into our eyelids.
Other days, our hearts are quick to fall into formation,
Well-rested
or still ******,
But we don’t let that change our pace, nevertheless.
Our mornings,
Our slow, stretching, simple mornings,
They let something live in us that i’m not so sure was there before,
A feeling so deep and peculiar,
An appreciation, i suppose,
For the syrupy-slow sort of way that we unravel ourselves at the dreamscapes
And knit ourselves into the fabric that is the act of being,
Gently.


One day,
Probably sooner than we’d like to admit,
our souls will wake slowly and our bodies even slower.
We’ll crack and pop from head to toe,
Our bones and backs will ache and pinch and grind and pull,
And we’ll adjust accordingly.
As we do.
We’ll let our bodies, knotted and frail,
Take their time easing into each new daytime.
And our souls, the same,
As they’ve grown accustomed to.
This, at least, we can give to one another.
On days that we have nothing to offer except
Yesterday’s leftover hurt and
The shells of people we once knew,
We once were,
We can give each other slow, steady.
We can sit together quiet,
unfold the sunrise
(or whatever happens hours after the sun rises),
And wait for our engines to purr to life.
If nothing else, we have our mornings.
Our old souls, our stretching muscles and moments.
We have it down to a science,
Us and our mornings.
Isn’t that lucky?


a.m.

it was only after you hurt me, after you sat back and watched me burn up in the fire you set, only after I spent so long desperately trying to stamp out the flames, overflowing with love and letting you soak up every bit without ever saying "eventually, I am going to dry up, eventually i won’t be able to extinguish the inferno you’re feeding", it was after I lent you my time and guidance as if I was a library with no return policy, it was only after I watched you take and take and take, and i filled you to the brim with encouragement, love, letting myself become empty, it was only after I built you up to be a tower stronger than any architect could design, after I let you watch me crumble, never once stopping to pick up the rubble, or better yet, after you brought the wrecking ball, it was only after I stayed and stayed and stayed, only after I became the mouse when all I ever wanted to be was a lion, after I allowed you to accept everything I had to offer as if you were a God and I was merely a lost and broken child who needed nothing more than just one blessing, it was only after you convinced me that I, someone so frail and unworthy and naive, could not survive this harsh world without you.

it was only after that I understood how a hiker who is trapped between a rock and a hard place can have the strength to gnaw off their own arm in an effort to survive.



a.m.

i promise i'll get better.

i won't ruin all your sheets with mascara stains and snot, i'll cook for you and sit through movies and family gatherings without bouncing my every extremity incessantly.

i'll get better.

i'll stop asking for so much and give more and i swear i'll be more myself. i'll wake up with the sun and you'll wake to me, the window, coffee, a book, breakfast. the mornings of puffy eyes and snoozed alarms and stacks of ***** dishes will be a distant memory.

promise.

i won't need you so much. i'll stop disrupting your evenings by asking you to come hold me through the thick of it. i'll take my alone time with a strong shot of gratitude and a healthy dose of missing you, but not enough to send me spiraling.

i promise i'll stop keeping you up so late with the sound of my thoughts echoing so loudly i swear you can hear them too. i'll get better at keeping the volume down so that every conversation doesn’t have to be saturated by the weight of it.

i'll take care of myself so you don't have to. i'll give you the best version of me, consistently, daily, the way you deserve.

i promise.
i just have to get better. i promise i'll get better.


a.m.

The walls –– they listen,
I know it must be true.
If not, then what’s the point
Of all this talking that I do?
I’m not going crazy here,
Trust me, I’m alright.
The walls, they hear my stories,
They understand my plight.
They listen, these walls,
When no one is around.
They keep me sane, these walls do,
They keep me safe and sound.
I don’t know what I’d do
If these walls ever would go tumbling,
Then who would ever listen
To my incessant mumbling?
The walls, they keep me company
They never leave me feeling blue,
So long as I have these four walls,
I know I don’t need you.


a.m.

Red-lipped
Devil woman
Can’t hold her tongue.
Smudge-lipped
Angry woman
Can’t have no fun.
Curled-lipped
Hateful woman
Can’t sit still
Rude-lipped
***** woman
Tell them how you feel.


a.m.

Once upon a time, you and i ruled the world.
Our little piece of it, anyways.
We were the mermaids and the witches and the princesses of the best backyard i’d ever seen,
We perfected the art of microwave s’mores and
Cannon *****
And we cried the way that only prepubescent girls can.
We had each other until we didn’t
Until we did,
And so it goes.

Our lives look different now.
The world is bigger than it seemed before,
And crueler.
We always talked about how we’d get here one day,
We just never imagined what it would take from us.

Somewhere along the way,
You and i traded in chasing golf ***** for chasing highs.
And dreams.
And men who always seem to overstay their welcome.
At some point,
we learned how to swallow hard
and keep our heads down through the thick of it
And to fight like hell to get to the other side.
Neither one of us made it through unscathed,
We were beaten and broken until we weren’t sure if we even had enough left to make a life worth living.
I couldn’t tell you how we did it,
But ****, i’m glad we managed.


I suspect that you and i,
We’ll be sitting on one another's beds
Recounting each and every scar
until we’re 90.
Maybe one day we’ll upgrade to King sized tempurpedic mattresses with silk sheets.
Maybe one day you’ll be breastfeeding your (second) baby.
Or we’ll be going over my (second) divorce papers
Or we’ll be planning a wedding.
Maybe we’ll be somewhere warm and worthwhile
Or stuck in the same cornfields we’ve always known
(please, god, anywhere but the cornfields)


To be honest,
I have no idea what our talks will look like in 10, 20 years.
What i do know is that it’ll always be you and i
Far too late at night
Staining the comforter with tears and wine and our bleeding hearts,
And for a little while
We’ll remember what it was like to rule the world.
Even just a little piece of it.


a.m.