My hands
are the shape of
this morning’s bagel: small
and untethered, sprinkled
with seeds, tasteful of hope
that today will hopefully be a good day.
I have made it - not for anyone
but for my own mouth. I have sipped
and tasted for years
what my hands have prepared
for me, cooked in the hope
that I could - no, will -
make a day good
for me.

Bottled root beer tastes like summer.
The kind I used to spend
on Kelley’s Island as a kid with
bicycles and put-put,
ice-cream cones too big and
beach trips that stretched
the length of a road too long.
The kind of summer that doesn’t end
but rather lasts too long
in the June-heat and lake-splashes - filled with laughter
from siblings who still haven’t grown old enough yet
to think twice about laughing with their younger brother.

Bottled root beer is sweet
with condensation and sweat -
sweet reminders on my tongue
that though it tastes of memories,

that makes it taste all the sweeter.

deep bass is
a wide-open-night. Sweat and
stupid questions that really -
didn’t matter all that much
by the end of the night. She
once told me,
I don’t like poems with awkward line breaks -
I like full sentences there.
I dance along to deep bass and - by doing so -
I have awkward line breaks. I have incomplete
thoughts
that don't matter all that much.
I swear I don’t remember the way her arms
swayed as she danced to the Beatles - or,
even the space among teeth as she smiled.
deep bass plays me a song and
I try to dance but my my mind keeps
with questions of how she must be - no!
No. I do not want to think that.
but - yet,
my brain keeps with it, so I do. I do.

Lovely:
he hands a helmet, she
slips away with him into the night -

The rest of us -
we talk about concerts
and what makes relationships last:
I wouldn't know that though -
my head is still
wrapped around my last one, although,
I think it goes
a little something like this:

I will hand you my helmet
and you will hope
this doesn't crash.

Let me keep this simple - I do not
like my face, my hair, the veins that
pop and throb and burst from
my hands; I do not like my voice or
the way it sounds and scratches at
this air, this space, this empty layer
of skin and feelings that hang around
me like a bog. I woke in my ****, clawed
at my eyes to have them open; I banged
and shouted at my face to have it look
differently, slightly, highly better than
this but instead of doing as I commanded,
it stopped and smirked and smiled at me
with such god-awful bravado that as I turned
it barked at me from the glass bubble that
could so easily shatter, I know you - like no-
one else - and that scares me the most. I was
in a class, windows peaked open, and I
swore I heard a voice - it was my own.
I heard you, I heard you for the first time
then, but you did not say “I’m scared”, you
just told me, I know, I know, I know this
can be scary, but that is okay, that is
okay, you are okay.

I am okay.

she dances in the light -
I see the outline of her
move and undulate before me,

waves that never stop to crash
and a shore that never seems to leave -

she dances in the mirror -
I watch her shape before me
become clear and clearer in this light,

she smiles and I smile back -

a dance that I don’t want to stop

There are stacks
          of old paper -
my old thoughts.

Rough and torn,
          there are many -
they tell my life.

On such old, sad
          ground - I walk;
I walked here many times.

Life will continue
           and continue
to stack - and I

will continue to write.