The tiny starfish hands pressed on both my cheeks. Her heart trembling in her sea-washed, sky-gray eyes. Little delicate lips pressed in an adult line of barely-controlled emotion. The *****, dully-shining tear streaks that drew paths through her freckles. Butterfly kisses, I would tease her as I swept her into the salty air.

I have to focus. I steel myself, dragging memories from the back of my clouded mind and setting them before my fogging eyes. I refuse to let them slip away again. I could never live with myself if I did.
I had said something to her. Ignore the fact that I can’t remember what it was. She smiled through the tears, her laugh a reminder that she wasn’t the adult she was trying desperately to be - that I was forcing her to be. I had wrapped her in my arms for the last time, lifted her toddler body easily from the sand. She held onto me tighter than I thought she could - another underestimation, I suppose. My neck started running with her tears. I hummed her song through a choked throat.

“Momma loves you.”

Fairly standard, as far as last words go. But sufficient. I am satisfied. Flashes of that day, the departure, boarding the ship, lacking the strength to watch my daughter fade into nothing behind me, spin past my eyes with increasing speed. Funny, everything else has slowed. The water makes my limbs sluggish, the ropes twining like lazy snakes around them. The footsteps of my heartbeat have slowed their pace, leaving longer and longer pauses of silence in their wake. Even the glittering light, what there is of it, is lethargic in its reaches to my nearly-blind eyes.
With all the salt-water clouding my vision, dimming my memories, I could swear the sea knows of my loss. It must: it is weeping with me.

"She floats!"

Her father yelped
His eyes fixed on the water
He thought the girl could be helped
But after so many tries, he decided to put an end to the bother

She floats, yes, indeed she did
Her eyes wide and smiling
She knew her father had finally lost his lid
As the bodies of townsfolk kept piling and piling

She flitted her eyes to the dock
Where her father raised his eyebrows
He had tried everything, but now the locks refused to lock
The chains went to ash and he was done with the whats, whys and hows

She kept smiling at her daddy
In that reassuring way
In her mind, she too had had it
She'd had enough of play

"I don't know what to do with you anymore!"*
And she nodded in agreement
As he screamed from the shore
The policemen he had sent
To show her God's path
Had been lit on fire
With a fury that he thought even God not hath
And now, here she was, tied with rope and wire
Floating in the middle of the ocean
Smiling and smiling, knowing her father was a liar

So many things to say.
With no time left to say them.
Waking up slowly,
To an empty bed.

Every day,
The heartache sets in.
Breathing in without you
Hurts.

Do you even have the time
To stop and think,
And wonder.
And miss.

I think what hurts the most.
Was not being left alone,
With answers untold.
With hopes destroyed.
And wonder left to dust.


I’m getting nowhere, it seems…
But I’m trying.
To get back to who I was.
Even I will never be the same.

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven't got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design -
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them - love,
your very life, should they need it - will not

and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what's to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

Stop the seasons
Halt the pain
It’s not your fault it rains
In her bedroom
But dysfunction needs a shepherd
She never meant to agitate
Love’s dark sisters
But they stole all her weapons
Bound to the bricks by a kiss
And a head wound
Once you feel the drowning
You’ll always be beneath

There is a gaping crater in your heart,
my haunting dark moon, i  see it there,
torrents of words, like a cloak of mist swirls across,
you spin a beautiful web with that,
I got trapped and fell; so glad!

my moon bitten heart is falling apart,
and i am simmering in thoughts-
day and night.
your wandering thoughts, you hope
would cover your crater for ever,
but wouldn't; i know for sure.
a crater my love, has its demonic powers,
i can feel the tremors from afar,
                                       in an evil hour, every night
i wander in a trance, copiously shedding tears,
**it would run in to a gushing river
and fill in your crater--
but how would i ever reach out to you there?

The world’s light shines, shine as it will,
The world will love its darkness still.
I doubt though when the world’s in hell,
It will not love its darkness half so well.