pinky promise

we've forgotten our mortality
our impulse to smile at *blooms
we've stared at childhood photographs
and wondered why we look so angry

the art of fault and denial are synonymous
we've stopped speaking in hopes that silence really does
speak volumes,
our bodies could fell, cracked down like oak and our voices
remain like cocoons, papery whispers swathed in duff,
still breathlessly prating, foolish and juvenile.

which goes to say-- our thoughts
far procede the vessel, would last beyond our
deaths and ancestry--

i once spoke about anger being passed down
through the blood of irishmen - who long held the
propensity to bar fight and brawl
long standing feuds poured from mouth to mouth
downriver, across the gap, occasionally skipping a generation
the woes of our fathers are dead languages that we keep--
tongues we deliver on our own

we lash out and are our mothers
or laugh and see our fathers
never quite our own until burgeoning, and not even that --
not all of us bloom, some of us violently tear away
break the root and toss ourselves among the rocks
wilted but brilliantly colored  
       desperate to
                   learn how to speak.

9th and main wasn't
busy but I still wondered
how my bike wasn't beneath
me anymore and if I really
screamed when the back
wheel went up, because
for a moment I thought
this isn't really happening
I don't really get hit by cars,
this is something that only
happens to Anne Hathaway
but i pulled out this morning
after a night of of maybe being
afraid that I wouldn't wake up
struck by a new fear of the ways
i can't see around buildings like
i used to--and maybe i'm being
a bit dramatic but i pedaled a
little slower today and my head
hurt with all the ways my leg
was bruised

it wasn't that busy on 9th and main
but I still wondered how my bike wasn't
                                                                                               beneath
me


anymore.

out behind the town
there's a field between
the trees, growing dead
grass and at 7:03 just
before sunset, it bleached
itself in white then faded
to a soft cornsilk, and the
gnats weren't gnats anymore,
but specks of gold casting
threads of shadows in the
light fuzz and while no
one saw, I sparkled.

There's a narrow speckled gate
here, that bakes in the afternoon,
sunlight streaks nakedly through
crimps in the iron, fortified metal
lips, curled like payot. Air thick
with lime, daisy, daisy, daisy
sometimes I stand under the
arch, reaching back and forth
between worlds.

Early morning before
anyone has ordered coffee
and I feel delicate in the dewy
sun with the heater on low
at my ankles, I reorganize
the drawer below the register
gingerly feeling at staples and
rubberbands, Caleb watches from
the corner on tea with raspberry
in doc martens and ***** trousers
I wonder if I seem as pretty as I
feel or if he feels the staples too and
the dust from gift cards, if my hair
flares out in the light, if I am a brilliant
solar eclipse.

I've always talked so much
but by default i am so quiet
i've justified to the ends, desperately
craving a higher truth, an understanding
to be read like a book, like a definition,
strove to be transparent and faintly beautiful --

but i am like red lipstick, dark and
upendingly alive, made of fifteen different
blue pantones and a single swatch of yellow, you
can't explain colors as much as I can continue
to explain myself and

honesty, honestly, is sometimes better titled,
better left to a word, a note, a song or
nothing
   at all.

I've always fallen in love in autumn
always to fall apart early spring--
call me deciduous, the abscission just happens,
I've considered my winter coats, my shields,
the neat places I've tucked myself away

were we to overwinter?
to hibernate until further notice?
the titles were frightening, impending and
ominous, each one a textbook on subjects
we had no knowledge of, dark leatherback novels
featuring versions of ourselves we never meant
to be or never knew we could --

wrapped in sleeping bags and white down duvets
best during the winter becase we were both
raging fires, flames licking at eachothers doors
stopping short of our naked toes, put out by the
here and there snow, but sometimes
we were embers, pulsing stones of coal
settling, wishing, waiting, kissing wounds
breathing secrets over bruises--

but migration comes suddenly,
i've been in and out dormant for years
a sputtering volcano rumbling and groaning--

were we to overwinter?
I lost the dream woke with a start,
the caldera gave way and sunk in
terrified I'd take you with,
but travelers don't pause for eruptions
or make their way through magma --

and volcanos don't plead
   for them to
       stay
       were we to    
                overwinter?

I have always thought of home to be a place
have described myself within a myriad of
different protagonists, herbs and flaccid analogies
i have been birds nesting in rafters, wolves
and nothing more than a willowy spirit without a
body--

and i thought for a moment that people could be homes
too, the way you walk into hugs or are metaphorically
gathered, i watched him in the mirror sliding around
my waist, resting on my hips, smelling my hair, picking
me up to put in a vase, ridiculously pretty, you know that?

and it's not that I longed for more,  
that I have longed for where, for a here that
i am acutely aware of how i vacillate between empty
and overflowing, of my own thoughts, i have heard
you think too much and maybe I do-- maybe too much
of me lingers

In dreams I unzip and turn myself inside out
like a dress, fold my shoulders down and the mountains
reappear, i am all the grass of a former self, before the tides and winds and men, before my choices bent me back
and took a swiss army knife to whittle me away

i think i am longing to be clean
to be over to breathe and not feel the strings
the way my voice splits into a rank of pipes swelling into a hundred  voices and he only hears a few, i am many
longing to be one, he cannot twist the drawknob
because I am already filling the cathedral in the words of
Stravinsky, the
                                m onster never b r e a t h e s


and I feel like i never have
i am earnest to fill my lungs with air instead of water
join the present, but the Welsh knew me too well,
the portuguese, saudade and the Germans, sehnsucht
put a letter to the things that can only be described in paragraphs or tears or indeterminate intervals of time sitting on his bed while he showered, all the doors slammed, empty coffee cups,
clogged sinks, unswept floors, long drives,
shots of whiskey, withering glances held on tension and
te amo mouthed across the room--

we wonder, can we be reached?  wrought? touched.  found.
in our deepest hearts, wounded mysticism, an untapped sense of joy that can be lanced and spilled, I am wistful, anxiously waiting to be siphoned,

Hiraeth.

he doesn't read these
anymore but who does?
i've always communicated
the best through silence

drafted out a couple i miss you's
but who's gonna receive them?
keep pushing it out a little farther
to see how long I can make it,
and every day it's a little longer
you gotta make it hurt
while she leaves
and tough draw kid
well, those were the right words
and i'm okay now that i've
really ground it into the dirt
and woke up this morning
pretty much done with
just about everything
said fine, God, you've got me
and I still don't really want to
listen but know better than to
talk back, even daddy
didn't take no ****
so I know he ain't gonna neither

well i drifted pretty far
cause the wind takes light
things easily, so i aim to
be heavy as all the ocean's
water but still as small as
i can be, no i don't want to
be no big thing,
let me fall back into the way
it's supposed to be,
when I was okay with
growin' up the walls
finding the cracks
when i spoke with
roses on my breath
i know she's still there
cause i still call them flowers babies
and the daisies, sweethearts
please grow, i tell them.
please don't die,
i whisper.  yeah,
she's still here.

god has spoken
help me listen
help me listen

Do you remember the apple cider?
Your house was always cold, every-
thing was always apples. I never
did get the matching triforce tattoo
with you and that is okay because I
don't like tattoos anyway. You didn't
ruin the Legend of Zelda for me, I
just said that. Remember to drink water.
Remember that everyone you ever meet
is responsible for their own feelings and
their own problems. Remember that lots
of things provide temporary fixes but
never solace.  

How about those frogs? Never a silent moment
until I yelled out your window and you lamented
over the amphibious life you stole with the lawn
mower. (I noted that I had caught frogs at my
grandfather's funeral).

Here's to your earliest memory. Standing in a hamper looking out
the window until your mom picked you up. Was there a bucket
involved? Here's to your scars, your split finger, right next to your pinky the red
on your cheeks, the rough texture of your triceps. That other chris in
kindergarten, Mercer? Did he steal your first love? Haven't smelled
your stomach for a year but I am pretty sure it still smells like
leather. Your hair, soft in the middle, rough around the edges.

Will I ever have enough documentation?

You taught me that tap water doesn't **** and that
all you have to do to make anything perfect is add
an egg or two.

Deep breath
Deep breath
Deep breath
Deep breath
Deep Breath

I told paul that
i am convinced
everybody is conquering
the world while I am just
sitting in this town full of
old angry white people
growing smaller by the
minute. There is either a
light too bright about to
henceforth burst out or
i am just simmering down
to a low boil destined to be
only half as special as what
every boyfriend has ever
deemed me.

Paul said a lot of things about
"my own journey", terribly cliche
things about success and happiness
but one statement that struck the
right chord

Aren't you realizing the good you're doing for yourself?

Something I could understand. Yes, I realized this.
but that didn't change the fact that the good I was
doing for myself seemed so utterly boring in comparison.

For a while i ignored what everyone said
you were my best friend
I stood
I sat
I waited
for you


and in the end you didn't wait for me.

i am tired of chasing
the people that don't
exist and feeling lied
to far after the fact,
so long down this
road that I no longer
have the right to ask--
were you, did you?
did she, was she?
i am hurt by all
the moments I allowed
myself to be involved in
that only served to show
what a silly fool I was
for not discerning soon
enough, for not saving myself
preserving something I'd always
held in high regard and now
it just feels stolen or dead
and I am ashamed to
wonder who could love me now
after that, after he,
after


after.

The bees
call her
a flower

A friend once told me about
the rules
The Proper Dating Etiquette
what to and what not to say

I mean, stephanie, it was right there
I told him I want kids someday
Mentioned that I wanted to get married
Not in that order

I always figured that the right
person wouldn't be                         scared off
by those things
wouldn't be frightened
by the truth

I guess

I find myself apologizing for the
music that I like and the way I talk,
letting people know that I say one
hundred wrong and I'm constantly
saying words with the wrong tone
apparently I say theater like an old
man and I'm sorry that I don't know
a lot about the pixies I can't fix these
little things about me. I will never know
more about john frusciante or IGN, I'll
never look into video games on my own
whim

I'm so tired of putting my radio
away and being afraid, that if
I play my music everyone will
walk away. That I have to make
the rhyme obvious to see, that I
have to split these paragraphs to
make it more easy. That I have
to censor everything I say, that
I have to stoop to a level that was
never easy to reach. I thought things
that were higher were the standards
to vie for but bending down is a task
i have fight for.

oh well he's
still looking for his Mary
dressed in black, a vice
for him (or a grip)
with smoke curling
out of her ears, ready
to take him away, he ain't
no devil but he sure as hell
looking for the woman herself
with hips swinging always loaded
made fresh in the Rye factories
a tall glass but she always empty
he's lookin' for them girls to fill,
that have followed him 'round
since 2010--least that's what she said
the ground is hard, packed and trodden
but that's where she is, curled up in
florals and denim, she still
burnt as the core of a fire
and they always go out
you've seen it, woken
up in the morning
with crumpled tin
buried in white ash
and wood so black
it just crumbles.

earlier today during service
I was struck by a strange vision--

that I was running breathlessly
through a misty field, terribly
afraid and naked with a .69 caliber
flintlock musket bucking against my
hip, and the mud did no justice, neither
did the deep grass stains on my belly,
to hide how truly piteous and terrified
I was.

As if somehow during the battle I had lost
my company or else deserted, been stripped
and cashiered--left to my own to roam the empty
wilderness that creaked and cracked
the air that shivered in my supposed dissolution
my feet caught in the dense mire, the very ground
that used to be so resolute, firm to touch
was giving in,
swallowing me without mercy,
I had been separated from my regiment, I thought.
But only deserters would think such a thing,
I had left and was lost and

the congregation began to rise to sing
but I was still there with burning lungs
desperate to find the colonel or captain
the leader or teacher
the father or
God.