Your death was an easy escape.
You drank the depths of your despair
And drowned.
Not brave enough to be called suicide,
Doubt you even intended to die.
I care little.
Though so did you it seemed -
Not only for yourself
But for the lives in your hands
Of strangers and your own creations.
Depressed they said,
drugged up;
My sympathies
Have boundaries.

You latched onto innocent bystanders,
Tied ropes to their legs and locked them to yours.
A lead weight,
As you drifted to your demise.
Your lungs went dry and your eyes went blind,
Never to face
The consequence
Of all you left behind.
You did not watch as they struggled to stay afloat,
But I,
With my pure and petrified eyes,
I watched as they almost drowned.
Pulled down with your worthless body,
Helpless to set them free.
My hands were too tiny to untie ropes that you burned into skin.

The hate runs deep in the water,
and the ripples are forever carved in cement,
So how can you be granted forgiveness
When you’re not even here to repent?
What you did was ******.
You stole lives,
And left lives,
Now forever tied
To the weight of your careless mistakes.

It’s cold out,
But I want to lean over the side of my bed, grab my blue flannel pajama pants from last years Christmas, And slip them up my skinny legs for a drive.

I would pass up the dim, street-lit highways to arrive at the airport.
I would leave a note on the granite counter top for ma, to explain that it was desperate times escorting my desperate measures.

I would arrive at the gate with my flannel pants, my mobile diary, and my heavy hanging shoulders with my puffy tired eyes.
I would board my plane, eat my peanuts, and since it's Thursday and Thanksgiving is a weeks past, spread myself out across the row of emptied seats.
I would get two hours of rest to wake up with frost on my side window, and the snow of Denver to keep my chilled company.

There I would board my bus for my fourtyfive minute adventure to Boulder.
Thats where we would meet, you with your Audrey Hepburn hair and perfect pearl smile,
A cup of coffee in your left hand and a cup of cocoa in your right.
Me with my flannel pajamas and oversized jacket
With nothing else to offer--except for my presence.

We wouldn’t say much
Just giggle and give some hugs in the dead of Colorado’s bitter beautiful nights,
Before heading to where you call home to cuddle and hide from the rest of winter.

One little window
in
my tiny dorm
room.
To watch the sun rise
and then
sleep

Makes me miss my tree house windows
untoasted bagels
for breakfast
And a textbook
for a friend--
Thomas's 12th edition

One little
Window.
That keeps me sleeping
Until
noon.

One little window.
That keeps me
so concealed.

One little window
That makes me miss home.

Put everything familiar inside of a red raft,
on smooth mud-covered waters,
And as his heals sunk to the sand
I didn't know the compassion that was coming.

Your vastness encompassed not just my body,
but my mind.
I was encircled in your silence,
Your golden sun that by night was replaced by an even more enormous beauty;
Lost in your curved and jagged love.

Birds of every blue,
water that tickles back as you touch it,
and wheat brims that stretch for miles.

Those Rock edges,
two hundred feet up,
they leaned down.
Leaned down and grabbed around the small of my back
and the Earth hugged me--
warm and familiar

Then released me back to my boat
I lay:
face to the sun - back to the river,
and whispers of wisdom created ripples in the water.

The warmth of the rubber took to the curve of my spine
Feeling like I'd never been let go.
I don't even think I realized how much I love you
Until our eight hours wore down—too quickly.

So as I left my memory,
I leaned my face to the sky,
pressed my chest to the sun,
And tried to let you know
That I was hugging you right back.

In the mornings I stayed in the blue, carpeted room.
My Cello played the best friend, while I played upon its bare back.
The halls sat silent there.
The walls, bear aside from the occasional music note half sticky-tacked to the white cement, only emphasized my isolation.
They hung yellowed from UV light, and their own forgotten presence.

After the day slipped by,
Through Stephen King book pages
And colored comics,
Through love notes scraped into wooden tables,
And the ring of my own repose draped upon me by scrambled, and passing conversation
I would make my way to the baseball field.

5’4” and nearing  200 pounds
My ardor was never withheld even in the face of exclusion.
I tried for the team
But when the roster ruffled in the fading sun behind the bleachers
I made myself a part of where I was not welcome.

I loved the team
Even as snide comments slithered
Through the teeth of passing players,
Even as the coach spat not a centimeter above the toe of my white, worn tennis shoes
I came day in and day out
If not to catch the practice ***** then the occasional smile of young girl—a pitying young girl, but a smile nonetheless.

The life bodes loneliness,
But to me it presents possibility.
Never doubt the adequacy of introversion.
The quiet mouth begets the much more boisterous mind.

The outside edges of my hands are bruised black
From banging at the bathroom door

I've given up, and let my back slide down the wall
And my face fall to my palms-
Taking a seat in my empty dark hallway that leads to the slither of pink light crawling its way through the bottom of the bathroom door

She won't stop crying
It feels like it has been months
Her, in her sunlight bathroom moaning with agony until I feel I just can't take it
Sitting on the other side with the emptied out sun
With the helplessness of a child
I almost feel crazy

Like she is not the woman I love
Like she is not a woman at all;
Just pain at the end of a dark hallway
The sound of lungs gasping for air
clasping for some sort of reasoning
Hunting for it, but never finding

A sound made of memory pressing its echo against the walls

It drives me lonely

But she lay on the other side against the cold gray tile and I can tell she does not even hear my bangs on the door
Nor the hollow cry she pushes up her own wooing throat
All she can feel is the pull on her heart and the pressure on her chest

Her cry drops to a sob
Then eventually a whimper
And topped off by exhaustion she falls silent

I pull myself from the wooden floors with the help of the cool steel handle of the water heater door
I walk through to the bedroom
and stand mindlessly sifting through my own junk of the dresser drawers before pulling a bobby pin from her neatly organized section to the left of mine
I walk back to the bathroom
I feel my eyes droop as I press my forehead to the white painted wood
I hear her almost silent, but heavy, breath
Creeping with orange sun beneath the edges of the door

I sink to my knees and play with the lock and the bobby pin
Until the door gives way
It slowly opens to her
Her left arm sprawled behind it
Her head curled into her right
Her legs, stacked right ontop of left, push backwards and up against the long backyard window

I lower myself down next to her with the assistance of the porcelin sink
Her face is still wet and red
Her eyes closed and her breathing labored
I curl what I can of her up into my arms
I take a folded beach towel from the brown wicker basket and lay it underneath my head
Propping hers onto my chest
I grab another and unravel it across us

I don't want to wake her
I will give her, her "petite death"
A small escape
But her eyes flutter
To meet mine for a second
She opens her mouth
Letting her head hang back a little
As if to begin crying once more
Like a newborn awakened from its sleep
Confused and in a darkening room

Exhausted:
She pleads no more
She lays her head back on my chest
I feel a few warm drops of salt water
A pull at the rib cage of my black tee
As if to say "I give in"
And then I pull her in closer
To listen to her heavy begging breathe

We both let our heads fall back to the towel
or into my chest
We fall asleep in the darkening room of the fading red sunlight, with the cold tile floor at our backs, with nothing but a black hallway behind us

Some nights I wake up and your face is the only thing I can see.
Light cheeks freckled with a soft beard
And ice blue eyes more piercing than my own.

I'm not the best at remembering my dreams so when this happens I just assume I've been having bad ones.

To appease myself asleep again
I envision your pig body back on top of my princess one,
But this time
When you raise my ankles over your shoulders
With a half smirk of self loving
I lean my knee back towards my face
(It almost feels ****)
Before shoving the heel of my foot forward and into yours.

No matter how many times I replay this I never get to see in your face how it hurts you.
So I get up,
Throw my clothes back on,
And leave.
This is my only lullaby back to sleep.

You will always follow me
Like melting canyon walls
Grown of glass
Forever folding inward
At my back.
In my mind;
Even when the rain clears up
You still stir
Your whitened waters.

One day,
When you left me
Mid-November,
heat still settles in only the South
The sun stole every sip
Slurped up every drop
From every pore
In my thinned body.
You almost killed me
I suppose-
Even then-
You tried to save me
Saving you
Hives across my body:
Holding aquifer pockets
Of your own blood.
You tried to warn me
With swollen, itchy
Reddened feet
My fingers burned,
But I went to sleep.

Awakened with delusion
You kicked at the curve
Of my knee
I; collapsed
Unconscious
With only pain running through my bedrock veins.
You left me,
With white running down my face.
You showed me how much mama loves me
Barely breathing
Bent over my body
With her own salty piece of you falling in my face.

Neaseous,
I could no longer hold you
No matter how much I longed to.
Mama took me to you.
Again, like glass on a November morning you sent ice through blue blood and back to my heart.
Like mama,
You screamed
Until you brought me conscious.

Twice mama had taken me to you
And on the first I'd fallen in love.
Hooked to an EKG
My eyes rolled back to when we met
As they pulled tubes of my blood from body
Weakened, I held only a blurred memory
Of three years ago
When you carried me over your muddied body,
Still with softened white ripples,
And warmed- no matter how far upstream- by July.
It was there
Touching the silk of your skin
With sun on my chest
And life at my back
That I promised
One day,
I would save you too.

She's short.
Shorter than me. About 5 feet and one measly inch. Grant it I'm only two measly inches.

But I'd hug her. Wrap my arms up and around her teeny shoulders and back around her small frame.
I'd hug her. Tight and close.

She is the smallest of the three of us. However, she's the oldest. She will be twenty tomorrow.
I'd hug her like the first time I left her as she went to her decorated dorm room for college.
I'd squeeze her. For as long as she would let me hold her.

At that time she had just wanted to be free. A few months later she cried to me about how she wished she was home, back in bed sleeping beside me the way we had spent most of the last two years.

I miss her. Oh, how I'd hug her.

Skipper. Petit and sad. She sometimes hates the hugs I give her.
My mom always says she is lucky. She needs someone as warm and loving as me.

I'd hold her, keep her there until I had to let her go. Or at least until she made me. Yet, I know she cried too as she walked away and we stood and watched.

I wish I spent more of my summer a long side her. I regret it and I'm sorry I didn't.
It may have been her last summer home.
I didn't even drive her to Colorado. She didn't mind. She was excited for her new life.

If I had spent my time with her I would have made her miss me. She would want to visit.

I'd hug her. My arms around her bony back. I'd hold her.

Keep her for my own. No one could touch her. No one could hurt her. Not even herself.

It's been a long while
but I've no trace of time.

I'm covered in brown mud,
piled over with rusty
red and orange leaves.

I lay at the foot
of what now,
is an old friend.

It's not easy
to get much sunshine
the large Oak's roots
are what both isolate
and keep my company.

I'd been loved
a long while
but that story
is an old life lived
a memory
that became a fantasy
time stretched
until it's bonds broke.

They tried
to recover me,
for a short while
for something
that mirrored
commitment
at such a young
and impressionable
age.

They hunted
in and out
of trunks
of the large Oak's home
never to find
where I lay.

Embedded
in October's leaves.

Yet,
distance
didn't make
the heart grow
fonder.

I'd been lost
and long forgotten
at the brink of dusk,
at the ring
of a more warming
love.

They came back,
once or twice,
to test
the shaded wood,
the darkened dirt.

They came back
until leaves
covered me
eye-high.

If they were still yelling
for the track of my presence
I could no longer hear them.

Even if
they were still scouring
built-down woods,
I could no longer
see them
allow them
to catch my eye.

Even if they still loved me
I could no longer feel them
covered
by cracked dirt,
and crumpled leaves.

The roots
had become my lover
now
grown to hug
my rounded hips
my heaping
dirt-covered
smile.

The wind
doesn't play with me
much
only to allow
a sweeping
kiss of leaves,
or to pick
the dirt coat
from my back
and donate
to a better cause
the warming
of a seed
that tiny
Christmas Rose.

I quit
listening
long after
I quit
looking,
looking for the boys
that had once
loved me.

Only then
did he come
sticky handed,
dressed in metal,
and armed
to save
a princess.

Engrossed
in his enactment,
poking swords
at my Oak
demanding
emptied branches
release
his Rapunzel,
I saw him
catch glimpse
of my rounded edges.

I
didn't notice
until
I looked up
into those
adventurous
eyes.

He knelt,
gigantic
in young age,
he plucked me
easily
from my big
Oak roots.

He wiped
dirt
from my body
slowly
and softly
like I was
new-found
treasure
Like I was
the gold
every child
hunts for
in their own
back yard.

He ran
his rough thumbs
on my edges
never lifting
his eyes
from his fingers
on that short
walk home.

He rinsed me clean
under
warmed water,
wondered
about my stories
then dusk came.

I was tucked
warm
under his protection
under that imaginative
mind,
and the boy
made me his own.