Cruel Summer**

It’s a long cruel summer
since you’ve been gone;
starless skies
greet dreamless nights
and shadows eat my sight.
I thought it would be easy
not ever seeing you,
but everything I do
calls me to unsaid words
unwritten
unspoken
in many colors, but mostly blue.
~~~
Life is mostly hard,
filled with pain
abuse that makes no sense
and leaves us hollow sometimes.
Whether it’s at the hands
of those who raise us,
or the one who promises
to love us forever.
And worse, we sometimes lose
the ones we love the most-
gone
like mourning dew
on a warm summer’s day.
~~~
I know all this,
honestly I do.
Yet I never thought
it was you I would lose.
Don’t ask me why
I can not explain
my Daliesque dream
that you would remain.
Perhaps it was my penchant
at windmill jousting;
or reading too much into
Cervantes’ and his chivalrous
Dulcinea desires
that imaged you
dancing from chandeliers
or around those gypsy fires
on cool spring nights;
teasing me into submission
and confessing my “sins”
of falling for you.
I have no words
or rationale for any of this.
I just know
it’s a long cruel summer
since you’ve been gone,
leaving me all alone.
~~~
Maybe today,
while it’s sunny and warm,
I can find my sanity,
the rationale
to get out on my own
and sing some silly
80's songs.

Aztec Warrior/redzone 6.26.16

I want to tell him that I
love everything from a distance
but can cross oceans in seconds




that the people before him sopped
through my fingers like wet sand,
were ever flat and disarranged, empty
men with waterless words and exigent
appetites for my body--(that this is where
i learned the only way to please a man was
to give him myself)

I'm still undoing the knots, unraveling the little girls
coiled in lies, and taking mallets to the plaster molds
I built up around myself, mannequins for different men
and if there is anything I am confused
about it is him, his I-could-nevers, his frightening
absolutes, the ways in which he vows he can never change

you think you want me but at the back of your mind you want
something else

I don't want you--not like that. Not  as if
your worth was based on how quick you jump into the fray for my sake.  How many times you make me smile or say your name--however
you are soaked in rosemary and oil, folded up out of my notebook
into a thousand paper cranes--no, not even like that.

How do I tell you that I see your soul? Your threadbare spirits peeking out and the willowy fibers unraveled in your wake, that you are more than your mothers many marriages, more than the women you did not
want to have-- and deserving of a lasting love that transcends your mistakes and leaves your mirrors remarkably clean, did you know you can be clean?

How do I tell you that the broken do not fix the broken, how I cannot share the blueprint for healing but the burden if he asks--are we in the same book? The same chapter? I once heard that two people must grow in a similar direction at the same pace--are we on the same boat? The same road?  On the torrent seas, will you hold your own?

I realize I cannot come at you with such brazen artillery, that the paths I choose have no gates and are often unmarked, not even the grass gives way, nor the trees and twigs their secrets--and the journey is wholly faith, an expedition I have not fully taken but is presently on its way. When I tell you what falls first and where my priorities settle, I speak down the pike of the ways I hope to be and the woman that waits in whole.




So when he tells me I am confusing for the hundredth time and I sink somewhere off the Atlantic with the weight of my own thoughts, I am quiet.  His words are ever resounding but do not fill me up--just the glimmering hope that we will somehow

meet
in the



Middle