I still ask
myself why
you do the
things you
do, still wonder
if you hide behind
a paintbrush or
smoke blunts on
cliff edges with
pretty girls, wrapped
in bandanas, dust
and Albuquerque
sweat, I still romanticize
you in the back of my
head along with everything
else, and that song by Tori
Kelly winds back up over
the speakers.

we're standing at the corner of the
bar and for the first twenty minutes i'm
scared I didn't lock my car door.

I'm wondering why people are so fragile--
how some feel like staunch walls and others
bone china, how when you hold them, some
feel like they have been here and others like
they have been nowhere, as if you might
fall straight  through them because you
should know better than to lean on a shoji

When I touch people I feel their sadness--
bodies have shields but I've missed that
stair step, forgot there was a ledge there,
groped for the light switch and found                                air
he isn't a body, he's a hurt, a walking,
talking, immortalized pain.  


Sometimes I find myself desperately searching
for something witty, for a laugh, for an old topic
we've already discussed.   I ask did you get home safe?
by default because worry is the only place to go that's fair
territory, to care is to succeed, thrive in your propensity to brood

I'm still standing at the bar in a peach cardigan
the bartender squeezing in and out of the opening
and some biker with a gnarly gray beard buys us
shots of jameson which is pretty fitting but there's
still a full 4.30 worth of Redds in my hand that I
won't much touch--


Greetings from Inside My Head, a postcard I should
have sent out years ago, halls and halls of literature I've
written about each day, catalogued in scenarios, in fantasies
in trucks beds, events that lasted no longer than ten seconds
I've written monologues about people's fingers and how the
sunlight falls on different shoulders, every moment is a
stanza, every Alpha state a macrocosm, I'm in a room
full of well-oiled people and they're made up of tea
leaves, soot, black leather and molasses.

it's 11:33 and everyone's facing away from me for a moment
I keep telling Jessica she looks like she's crying, ironically, I didn't
know that's what happens when you're hammered.  I shake
someone's hand, my name is somewhere out there on the pool
table, knocked around and lost down a hole like a billiard ball
like with anything, comfort requires the right kind of place
with a specific time zone, the one that comes with certain
people and my clock keeps spinning,

spinning

spinning.

i am sure she is
just as radiant in
the sunlight, without
trying, as herself
and you in the doorway
with a mouthful of her
name, light and lovely--

*new.

is God by your bedside
weeping against the bookcase
and the cabinets in the
kitchen, filled with long
grain rice shudder and
tremble, vibrating against
their hinges --
it's all over the floor, you say.

it's all over the floor.

but all i
have to
say is
that i'm
terribly
afraid
of men

when he comes I hope i'm ready
I hope by then i have healed over
that my scars are just midribs and
my backbone the strongest flower
stem he's laid eyes on--

that i won't be the prettiest thing he's
ever seen but I might be the brightest
because maybe he'll see me from miles
out or maybe i'll be the dimmest glow,
maybe I will be the brick beneath a sheath of
Virginia creeper,  and he will have to pull
apart the vines to see,

i am not trying to hide I will say,
i've just been still for so long, i stopped
waiting, I was done hoping, i'd accepted
that you might not show up but lord
i am so grateful you did--

and maybe the rain will fall and
i'll stop being hidden without trying
and all the moments I laid in the tub
with the hot water running over me
will not seem so strange and I will
not shame myself for crying
so often.

He's tapping on the hardwood floor
to draw me out of the cracks, the
slender peels of sun stretched down the
hallways, arcing across the patio,
the way hard working men
rap their fingers against the walls to find
studs, stick pocket knives in the frayed wood
beneath the house--

shakes me out of the sand, viciously vibrates
me into his palms, tears me from
deep considerations
where i've already grown
where my roots have struck out
in all directions, says not in this place
not in this soil
not in this way

and I go where he pleases, kicking or
weeping, sometimes with ankles smarting,
raw from the whipping

not this place
not this soil
not this way

to the man who loves me next and last

at some point i'll have to tell you that I've
been waiting for you for years, and that in
the hearts of every passer-by I saw bits and
pieces of who i thought you'd be, half-truths
and mostly lies, fantasies and countless scenarios
buried in an inch of sand at the bottom of a flower
vase

that at one point you were a Chris or a Chaz and several
other men who never even made it past the door, sometimes
tall and usually short and even missing half of your pinky
in 2013--

but as it turns out, I always kept walking, and sometimes the
ground shifted forward and carried me away-- there were a
few detours and places where I'd be standing beneath a swinging
stoplight for an indeterminate amount of time, where I sent a hundred
postcards to friends and family in riddles and broken
seashells, roots still damp and undeveloped strips of film

And there were many days where I sat staring out the window
at the storm clouds rolling over the arkansas river, carving another
man's name into a birch tree dug into the shore, nestled into a hundred
other initials-- wondering if his hands were yours or yours his and if he'd be you or you'd be him--quit smiling like that, i mean it.

But if you count the number of days I work throughout the year and
realize that for all of those I twisted an apple stem and always came up
on a different letter, you might think I was a little bit obsessive about
my dreams which is probably why you never showed up--
when I was deep in between the mountains, trekking in the tall grass where the cicadas vibrated the muggy august air--

I'll have to admit these things to you, divulge the secrets to my fridge
and buy new perfume to christen you with the seasons, share the passwords for my wifi and clear playlists filled with memories of other people, but if you can believe it--I think we're a little bit closer.

things are moving pretty fast and I'm being shoved along as if by wind or flood or corn plow, scooped up and cultivated, i've been having dreams of multitudes, of wading out into the ocean to scoop up fish
and sea glass with silver flecks, old flattened coins with thick films of
verdigris--

I'll be sitting at work completely disgusted by myself--and that's how I'm sure. That I am becoming less of who I was and more of who you'll know, less of a thought and more of a concrete idea, a person, someone
worthy. Everything used to be discussed based on how worthy it was of me, but maybe I need to be
worthy of
you.


I'll have to tell you these things.

you didn't deserve my mother's
kindness, much less a grain of
salt, were she to bother with
you ever again.

I'm a resonant body,
made love to the man I hope
comes around in my dreams
and his torso distended and separated
kissed his stomach before his legs became
driftwood and slabs of black marble--
his house was carpeted in grass with
rivers running through them
and I stood half-naked at the
stream with a makeshift fishing
rod, folding spotted paperclips
into hooks, there were no doors
but you came around the sunlight
as if there was, stepped through the
air and stood beside me--and the fish
came to you one after the other
until I accidentally dropped the wire
and it floated downstream to the front
entrance,
where is my heart?
in the misty moors
burnt off by noonday
convalescing in mossy burrows
trying so hard to make sense of
the people that become bales of hay
matchsticks and empty cotton shirts.

In June 2013 I made fun
of you because your beard
was scraggly and patchy, but
you smirked and told me to
wait until your birthday,
because by then it would
be there. Well, your birthday
has come and gone and I anticipate
your pictures on instagram waiting for
that cold to strike me down, but you really
do have a beard now.

I'm standing at the departure gate
and the world is all before me, the
flight is leaving and I have two ways I could be going
I'm standing there in my best dress, in my heels
with my hair done up just like you taught me
with my shoulders back, just like that?
the flight is leaving, the flight is leaving
the flight is leaving

I blatantly tell
god I hate him
i really don't
want to be talking
to you right now
but I still cry over
scriptures from
Galatians.

well he's back from the rig he says,
heels up in dragon's blood
crept through denver at an easy pace, left his soul
on the toolcase, packed up with the coveralls
said there's never room for that--

and he sleeps while he's wide awake, said he
left his love up there, said he'll be by, but he ain't coming back
where back is home or here or me, he's spinnin'
i'm grounded, i'm looking for his strings,
he's unwound, divided and callin' my name--

used to kneel by my bedside, hold my hand around 10 at night
smelled like pine and cold wind, but you'd never tell him that
and I wonder about the longevity of his trust
the miles left in those long legs,
If I've all but said too much
to keep him runnin' from me

well he's stained by the deaths of many
and I've them locked away, makin' sure there's no anniversary
where he'll drink the funerals away,
we're both troubled by the other's demons
but his don't scare me much,
just play things and shadows all rearin' their heads
his own chorus of voices tellin' him it should have been him


and he sleeps while he's wide awake, said he
left his love up there, said he'll be by, but he ain't coming back
where back is home or here or me, he's spinnin'
i'm grounded, i'm looking for his strings,
he's windin', drawing fangs and ready to flee
to show me how fast he can run away, and he can
probably will, out of spite, out of fear--

and if timing is everything like he fancies it is
i'll be here waiting like i promised i would
'cause he'd hold my hand at ten at night
before i'd wait for the sound of that engine
pullin' up,
him whispering pretty girl
to wake me up,
hey, pretty girl

hey pretty girl


hey, pretty girl.