If the purpose of life is to make art;
I suppose,
All true artists go insane
Baring the entirety of life
On their shoulders.

In this moment I've never felt so empty

My heart is a wooden slab being knawed away at by pesky termites that leave unrepairable holes

And my lungs like Swiss cheese that can't seem to give me the oxygen I need in order to rid the lump of sorrow in my throat

It's in this moment that your back has turned to me, as I count your steps and wait to hear the slamming of a car door

I count on you to look back at me and smile, but my hope has again betrayed me, and I realize the last I'll see of you will have been this moment

So I've never felt so empty
I've never felt so alone

I sent it
At three AM
On one of those nights
Where silence gets violent
And I'm alone in my head.

I told you about the
Tiny pink pills
And how
If I took eight
I would sleep forever.
I gushed that
They were hidden
Under the toothpaste slathered
Countertop
In my bathroom.

I told you I loved you
But that
You weren't enough to stop me anymore.

I did actually consider it.
It was one of those nights.
But at some point,
As I laid on top of my comforter
And shivered under the fan,
I realized that
You weren't going to wake up
And convince me out of it.

I also thought
About how my mom was
A light sleeper.
How the floorboards would sound like
Orchestras
And the cabinet
Would be the symbals
To her.

I fell asleep
Numb,
But naturally numb,
And woke up wondering
What you would say.

You didn't say anything.

for Barry and Tina*

Life experience is something I haven’t witnessed,
the fitness of waking up and going back to bed
50 years on the trot.

But I look to my father’s hands and see
all twelve-thousand morning mists
he has seen.

A gristmill heart, grained hands
and workshop walking feet are
all hidden from view.

He writes in capitals, written
with precision, and crosses the T’s
as he goes along,

So not to prolong the sentence writing chore,
making more time, conjuring up the minutes
to potter around and mend unbroken objects.
-
Life experience is something I haven’t witnessed,
the fitness of waking up and going back to bed
50 years on the trot.

But I look at my mother’s hands
and see remedies read about in those magazines,
all to look younger in the staff canteen.

A watermill heart, smooth iron fingers
and contoured, sculpted chiselled
corridor feet are all hidden from view.

She scrawls her sentences; they become the tide
hiding letters and numbers in the swell
of punctuation and dotted I’s,

The T’s cross themselves and she moves on,
another phone call to attend too or
a new BBC this-time-more-accurate historical drama  to view.
-
Life experience is something I haven’t witnessed,
the fitness of waking up and going back to bed
50 years on the trot.

But if you keep on going, stay out of strong sunlight
so not to rot, those years will pass
as a striking blur leading to coastal Big Sur
roads, where the next 50 miles
bring just as many smiles as the last 50.