Most likely to joke
Most likely to balk
Most likely to start
a bar-fight.

Most likely to laugh
Most likely to pass
Most likely to
hold you high.

Most likely to croon
Most likely to croak
Most likely to hear
your heart.

Most likely to hinder
Most likely to leave
Most likely to
run too far.

I could lose myself
in you.
I could bury myself and
never look back.
But your love is
quicksand.

You're an
illusion. A card trick.
Houdini's Upside Down.
Will I ever
escape you?
Or are you
the lock that sticks?

He nipped
her lip the first time.
Back against the brick wall.
Bottles warming,
soon forgotten at their feet.

There was something
so urgent
in the way they fell--
limbs tangling on
or against
any surface that
could hold them.

But those surfaces were edged
in pasts long hidden
and razor-sharp,
wrapped in caution tape.

And they remembered their fragility.

So they tucked
in their elbows and
side-stepped each other.
Trading bitten lips
for shattering glances,
they told themselves
No.

But sometimes,
in quiet moments,
the Yes still breaks through.

My memories of you are wires
crossed with the stories
I’ve so often heard.
Dates and certain traits
are now blurred
and faded.
I can’t remember your voice.
It’s been years since I could,
but I remember
how it rumbled.

I do remember your arms—stalwart
and freckled so deeply they looked
tanned—the same arms that gave blood
in the name of each
of your grandchildren.
Your arms were my first charitable act.

When I would wake at four
and stumble sleepily into the living room
to find you watching the news
on mute
in that old battered recliner,
your arms were my rocking chair.

When you marshaled your parade
of capped grandchildren
across the street
to the park that will forever be yours,
your arms were a force of nature,
sending multiple swings soaring
into the air
in a complex rhythm
only you
could comprehend.

I remember your chest—barrel-shaped
and strong—creating a whistle
more powerful than I could fathom.
I still think of you
each time
I manage to carry a tune.

I remember your hands
picking me up and dusting me off
when I jumped
too soon.
The selfsame hands
that gathered up all the caps we strew
carelessly in the grass and mulch
balancing them one by one
atop your head
when the sun was setting
and it was time to leave.

I can remember
that lovely rumble
leading one final rendition
of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
as you marched us
safely home.

I was your antithesis
when your fragrant flagrance was
brash.

On the precipice of something great
they stood--or, rather,
sat--weaving hopes
into their palms and throwing shadows
just to find the ground.
Whatever they never were
fell from the soles
of their swinging feet and clattered
as it struck
the sides of history.

For a moment,
they let the madness
of memories
overwhelm their senses.
They could've gone so astray.
They could've been so static.
A half-written screenplay.
A near-forgotten attic.

But they had escaped
the ever-churning wheel,
the silicon bubble of this reality,
and burst brusquely and permanently
into possibility.

And they were exhausted.

So the rainbow-chasing was left
for another day.
A fervently promised tomorrow.
For tonight
they collapsed side-by-side
back into the present darkness.

Reality is vanquished
by the utter darkness.
The world is constantly
shifting--a pendulum
swinging across the sky.

But with no evidence,
this phenomenon can't claim you.
It remains obstinately
theoretical and the fugue
triumphs.

Only landing
can prove you ever
took off.

I'm a coffee ***;
you're in the mood for tea.

My body remembers you
even if I don’t.
I wake in the middle
of the night, my lips
tender from the dream of your teeth.

A stranger’s graze
an innocent nudge
and I’m cocooned
once more
in the routine
of your arms.

Here’s to the days
when getting out of bed
is a game of Russian roulette.
When the you that exists
above the sink
seems the more realistic
of the two.

When your pen is filled
with disappearing ink and
your face is covered
in quick-drying lead paint.
When the salt that shakes
from every orifice
coats your failing tongue,  
and you’re more likely
to bust your ***
than a move.

Here’s to those days—
let them be few and far between!
But if you crack that paint
and see the words before they fade,
you find all your possibilities.

Here’s to those self-same days
when you discover yourself.

They were two minds
in contention.
Spinning--always slightly
out of sync.

But they freed themselves
from the constant clashing.
Orbiting at each's own volition.  

As they explored
these different frequencies,
their thoughts became gusts
of unrelenting wind,
spanning silently
the chasm
of their own creation.

So,
without touching
or even knowing,
each shaped the other.
Eroding and weathering
until all that was left
were two hopes coursing
in near harmony.

Curled like an ampersand
around a telephone
that never rings in time
with the words that sing in her ears,
She waits again.

Her hands and lips
cold-blooded mercenaries
that ****** what she can’t quite hold
with silence and questions.
with ellipses and time.

So she pushes again
seeking definition.

But finding the horizon has never been so hard.
Her vision so thoroughly blurred.
And the sunsets force her closer to a Something
she can’t quite believe in.

So she pulls what she knows
into herself,
rolls into a familiar shape and waits
for a phone that has always been ringing,
A voice she isn’t ready
to hear.

My words are mirages
of satisfaction
when thoughts desert me.

Their existence was
an improbability.
an extravagance of fortune.

They were
spider-woven
and fragile--
each breath pulsing them
closer to oblivion.

Nothing about them
was built to last.
In the blinding imminence
of destruction

they were ******* beautiful.

When I open my hands
revealing the worlds smeared
across them, I’m not terrified
of what you’ll see,
but, rather,
what I don’t.

Barbed fingertips and dwindling
paths—this fortune’s not charted
for the faint of heart.
I’m mapless
and hesitating.

She once loved a boy.
With him, every moment was a movie.
And when he held her, it felt like home.

But that home was not built
on stable ground.

Swept up in fierce winds,
Dorothy darling.
Kansas couldn't be farther.

Ceiling quaking.
Flaking asphalt, falling
stars--cement breaking.

Murdered by hope
under stained promises
presently forsaken.

You're (barely) living
under the overpass

Love languages are meant to be understood. But with no dictionary, no encyclopedia, and a map only written by chance and time, understanding is an act of fate.

And who are you to fight fate?

Envision:
A boy & girl--more than children but not by half--moving ever closer. Swaying. Pulsing. Knowing each other's middle names but no more, they connected. Pressing. Clasping. Grasping.

Know more.

I wonder about the man with roses
if he still get kisses at the parade.

And I wonder about the boy with best intentions
and the plans that he mislaid.

On a separate coast from each of them
I put carnations in a spare green vase.

I could paint such wonders for the next three years
or leave my hopes in a remembered place.

A rose-window seldom resembles a rose
And we're taught that's okay.
An allusion will suffice
Where an illusion fails

And either is better than the third near-homophone.
The Carmen Sandiego of it all.

For if we cannot have the real thing
It's more fitting to sketch the bones from memory
Than to chase the world round
And only find its thorns.

[This is the start
to another goodbye letter
that—if I ever actually finish—
I’ll certainly never send.

I haven’t stopped believing
that my heart
beats in rhythm
to the echo of yours
and every lover before.

That the places I leave
stay with me
hanging like a beech leaf in winter
yellow and holding
after a new bud forms.

So, yes, this may be a resignation
or the start of the means to another end.
But even when I couldn’t love you
you still let me have a friend.]

Dear California…

Lovebirds gravitate to the same perch
beneath the well-feathered branches
of old cypresses (cypressi?)
that too many years ago
were uprooted and planted
on this side of the hill.

Up the now-mirrored steps
two bodies lean
from a spot you'd swear
is halfway between
the waters you wander through
and the oceans you wonder for.

Measured to the centimeter,
a ruler still won't tell you
the toll these trips take
on the limbs sprouting up from the sand
grounding down to the land
reaching out only to end in another empty hand.

But still the lovebirds pause here
in the man-made wonder
that may as well be a wayside inn
for all the shelter it gives
to those on the journey
with only one end.

At a beach on a coast
walking-distance
from my present home,
the wind cast rivulets
into the grains of sand.

In the shallow shadows,
I can see the gray
leading into yellow
Bleeding into its fellow.
Impossible to separate (or, at least, misleading).

So their togethered taupeness
will be sampled and classified
in a blue munsell book
with a breaking cover
I should've returned ages ago.

It's useful like this.
But did you know
a few pages away
you could find
the blue-green stain of my veins?

Why do I know this?
There are only so many ways,
after all, to fill the time
in the back of a truck in Georgia.
(Even fewer if you keep your seatbelt on.)

So chart my freckles next, darling.
Find a new slot and show me
how my skin
shares the same page as your own.
Just on a different row.

Above her door
sits a fox in blue shades of snow
made by a man she’d say she met twice.

Neither of them know
she'll take it when she goes
a moment of warmth carved clean in the ice.

Pardon me, while I pull
The stomach from my throat,
Take a look across the sea
And realize that it’s a moat

That I dug
And I filled
And I fed.

Now I sit upon the shore
Brittle tree among the reeds
And I wonder how I came to this,
Locked in sand up to my knees

I wonder if I’ll grow in this
And I wonder if I’ll leave
And all the while I’m wondering
The winds begin to seize

On joins and bends and brave young growth
And pull it from my form
Cast down across the waters storming
Unceasing til I’m shorn.

I gaze with straining vertebrae
Atlas’ burden at my neck
Upon my whorls and twisted limbs
Interrupted in reflect

As calming winds bolster
Such debris across the moat
I feel unburdened in acknowledging
Only strong wood floats.