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.)

The truth is
I stopped believing in you months ago
but the heartbeats that you lay
on your mattress are the most beautiful
sounds that I have ever heard -
so I wait for you to reach
for me through the dark,
I wait for the press between
your ******* and sigh into my own -
I dream that we will stop
doing what we’re told
and live in a land where
sadness is only a visitor
and I can love you until our tongues
are tired and our stomachs are fed.

& when I think of your hands
nervous around a coffee cup
somewhere in Ridgewood, Queens,
I understand what it feels like
to grieve;
I know what it means to set aside
the most fragile things
like they aren't worth anything,
even when they are.

I will light
a cigarette on a sunny morning,
musing about my own mortality.
And you
still child,
will roam about the earth
unknowing of the venom spreading.
They
will try to put out the light,
sixteen years of grass-playing
stomach-laughing,
beautiful caress of the Earth
felt wholly by myself.
There is no doubt
that when you leave,
I will follow along
wherever you lead.

I am living
and each moment is a reminder
of my fragile strength
and loving you in lengths,
uneven and lovely
all the same.
I want to read to you,
sing to you,
to scratch for you at the door.
I want to stick you to all the boards
in my kitchen,
to see through you
and into you like a breath.
I want to paint you in this moment
so I'll never forget
the lights on your hollows
and the teeth in your vowels.
But you are miles away,
living with a different name -
no longer named lover,
now just a friend.
I am greedy
waiting for our cycle to end -
when I can kiss you
on the mouth
and turn you inside out
once again.