I'm not a puzzle,
On a map.
I'm a plated tinder-cap.
  I'm the ***...
               You watch,
                                          That never boils.

I'm not the pressure,
On your skin.
I'm the Let-Me-March-Again.
  I'm the lust...
               You hide,
                                          That ever-toils.

                  (a pause, reset)

I am the weight,
That you ride,
I am the Ever-Justified.

  I am the Blue.

               I am the Blue.


                                                         ­ I am the Blue.

Sometimes I wonder if
the world is as big as it seems.
Are these people I avoid on the subway
in the hallway
on staircases
in elevators
really strangers?
And I think of how the glass plate
of a perfect window
looks crisp and familiar
to a doomed bird,
And how an unseemly field
turns into a battleground
And how a single glance
changes a life
And how big a marble must
seem to an ant
And how sometimes you can drown
in a drop of water
running down a stranger's check
And maybe the whole world
is just a reflection
in some stranger
in the elevator's
eye.

Her skin is held together
by a thread, rips and tears
make it hard for her to breathe

Vision going yellow in the
half-light, twilit fields rippling
in the breeze

Holding seeds between
her teeth, her bones balanced
over the concrete

She knows it will not last
forever - she has seen the yard
where she'll be buried

She's a victim still intact,
waiting for just the wrong eyes
to reach her hair, her skirt

Fear presses through veins
and she watches the sky,
remembering that angels

will wait, in the clouds,
until you need them - her
grandmother said, they

will wait, and she believed
it. Her cactus tongue ******,
catches blood there, and

the tide washes through,
its rhythm a comfort
She finds her way home.

a fist broken
uncurls tightly
(and from in
there bursts
a whole heart
laid o
           pen)

your mouth is a beauty
whose word i long to pronounce
whose keenness is marigold in summer
whose almost too fragile a slit
makes the fragrance of desire
whose language is heavy and soft
and suddenly across
your face it slices
more pink than bubble gum
and more sweetly to taste
more sugared and awefull
more impossibly resisted
your mouth is too delicate a flowering
destroying sound
of which i long to pronounce

The peaks in your voice crumble and shake
as you laugh
Rocks tumbling down the cliff,
boulders crash into the sea

This mountain life is tracked in your veins,
the cracks and breaks
shattering against me
in the rough hold of your arms

I never knew someone so holy
Your eyes held up to the sky, watching
the snow on the mountaintops,
whispering their names in the sunrise

And when morning comes, your lips
crack open, that precious smile
breaking free
from the traps you've held it under

I breathe in the years, wish
my mountain veins would peak like yours
Swallowing bruises under layers of skin
rocks settling in my blood, magma melting hot

Your dusty eyes my compass, I've come home.