I am constantly asking why
and when and how
did you become
something so gravely
attached to the hands
that beckon you away from me.

you are miles away
dancing in tall buildings;
I am under the stars
crashing into freedoms
you will never understand,
untamed and breathing in.

In time
I make it out of the arms
of my trailer park childhood
and into a resting silence.
In the desert
I am dripping blood
onto the things I own
from the inside of memories.
I grow older
and forget the bottoms of lakes.
I grow older
and forget the bottoms of lakes.
So,
I will move to the city
where I tell everyone
that I don't make company with ghosts;
that I haven't carved
photographs and heirlooms
from my spine when no one was looking.
How I never think about
your head on her pillow,
still.
My silence will rest on you,
gouge holes in the months
spent wandering through the east
with no mouth to speak.
I thought that you would
teach me how to speak,
my mouth to your ear
in such a tangled honesty.
But instead I sit dumb and dark,
waiting for you to reach me.

I remember
the days out west,
dust on my clothes,
kept thinkin'
of that torn up shirt
you used to wear
and how you smiled
when we made love.
Or
was it making love? -
Maybe without the making of anything
to choke with my bare hands -
you know how I like
to hurt
the delicate intentions
you never speak of.

Slow and dew
dripping from the leaves;
waking up with sunlight
on white sheets.
Lovers will come
to you as different colors,
some yellow and some so blue
you fit yourself inside an ocean
just to know them better.
Drown your body
in the tide of crisp bedroom covers;
drink the dew from the leaves -
this is summer in the suburbs.

Shy girl -
spinning, heathering at my feet.
I love you but I got to leave.
I love you and I waited
for you to speak,
but you never did.
(You never did).

Lie on a bed of spikes,
feel it, crucified.
At last, peace,
the nails through my hands,
my legs bare to the thigh -
I was over.
Frozen, looking at those frigid hands -
they were not bleeding.
Lay on the floor by the fire,
he kind of liked me,
I learn my lesson,
I was the dead quiet crescent court.
He beckoned,
I came - breaking, hearing the dry crunch,
dead quiet.
Snow in my shoes,
I felt nothing.
I heard the clocks striking,
deathly dreaming people went somehow to bed.
I slept six hours,
weary and waiting to recover.
They will be laughing at me,
hardly white - though they are men.
I shall be sober for so long.
Why won’t I see him again?
I won’t.
I dream of banging and crashing in a high wind -
I want to know him sober.
I want to write to him -
discipline and blaze.
I shall get some sleep and do so.

What a nice design -
her hips when she walks to me,
puts her hands under my shirt
like she misses me
when I’m gone.
Looking back on our time,
I suppose it was easier
to love her from behind -
******* to her favorite songs
(letting her string me along)
and leaving in the morning.
Pretending we’re like the beatniks
on our way to death,
stomachs unfed,
eyelashes on the bathroom sink.
I climb the ladder to her bed,
I build a place for myself in her head,
I paint her with pencils and she swallows my lead,
(I dreamt of this but I let her go
instead.)