Fighting to
maintain a
composure

I can't combat
loneliness, alone

this is such a soft loneliness
like a kindred spirit, heavy
and without doubt, she hangs
tears from her eyelashes, pairs
of glass ornaments and plants
tall cedars in the valves of her
heart that grow up the walls
and bloom in her throat, through
the whispers, how and why
how and why
how and why

i feel like a medley of bloods
of non-favorites and choices
left undecided, all corners and
edges--a heart beating in sheets
of rain where the freshet of my spirit
has ravaged the banks and driven
bones from this ossuary.

that leaves something to be said
about the state of greater things--
of the things i've left frozen that
melt in torrents and wash away
this facade of placidity, this
supposed contingency plan
swept away in a deluge of
all-the-things-i-had-going-for-me
and the worst of it is that i have
not yet been drained, I am still
raging, still raw and
r a g    i    n g

sometimes I
still taste you
on my breath.

So far I have picked up
my phone several times
while wondering in between
separate thoughts
what is the nature of his
intentions and why doesn't he respond?

I hate games, I hated Sorry,
Balderdash, Operation

He mentioned that all girls are crazy
hit the right spot,
I don't really think I am
but that doesn't change the fact that it
stuck with me

If I go through motions enough
the should i
could i
no i won't
do you think 21 times would do the trick?
or was it 28 to break a bad habit?

I didn't think he was a bad habit

Oh, he was three jobs, and school
a sport to attend to, more games
more everything else

and I keep considering the scenarios
how do i approach this? How do I seem unlike
the 'crazy' women he's spoken about?
oh, she's positively daft
he must say to himself

I think.

I *think

A dozen eggs
seven prayers
my lips aren't
soft, what am
I doing, God?

gotta stop trying
to win your heart
even though you're

gone.

What boat ever made
for sailing said to itself
"I would like to sink."
?

a run through the gravel,
stuck by quartz and geodes,
i'm not sure, can you heal
with the rocks still under
your skin?

he speaks a kind of
currency that could
pull the stars closer
if that kind of thing

were possible

There was a tube
of chapstick in the
lapel of his jacket
and i wondered
silently if it
might be
the same
as a kiss.

the drive down hardscrabble is filled with
the rasp of Jim's feed truck and the heavy
jangle of steel parts in the side compartments.
For a while we don't speak and i lose myself
in the stars, eaten up by Ursa Major, broken down
and condensed, blown out and away--
His headlights wash across the aspens
with their rangy bodies congregated on the
western slopes; spectral and reminiscent of
dancers or other sylphlike beings captured
unannounced.


when I think back on this moment
I realize that's where it all ended
the last moment where for a few
idle seconds, it seemed like
maybe it could work
out.

there's a barely-there eroticism about the
way he touches me, with rough, seasoned
fingers pressing eagerly between the tendons
in my wrist, racing up my shin or gingerly sweeping
the inside of my thigh.
I
used
to feel all the time

I am done
playing with
clay, with mud,
making pots
and men.

Take your knives and
graters, peel my onion
layers, get me pure
down to my core.

right after we reach that point where for the first month all I want to do
is explain the same things over and over to you, whether it be the things
you said last week or the things you said just today, or the way I feel
about you in fifteen different languages (with the first 13 still being English)
and that 34% of the time the water will be too hot and I will come
on too strong and all of my poems will be these drawling confessions
of love, because I do, I love. And it will never be that I fall in love easy
but more that I see the wounds in others, their quick tempers and shortages, the vices they pull from their back pockets when
dead friends come alive in conversations
the night he died he--


The truth is, before you date me--
the first forty-seven dinner places
will likely be Subway and Chiles
I won't eat onions in front of you
and if my carpets aren't vacuumed
you're not coming over.

the truth is
I spend a lot of money
on things I shouldn't and
will always opt for breakfast foods
or a jar of peanut butter over a
meal, furiously switch through
harmonies to Traveling Soldier by
the Dixie Chicks

the truth is


the truth is.

These are only guidelines and I am more predictable. My fantasies include meeting your family,
cooking with your mother
and several disjointed memories
strung together in this big awkward conglomeration of
sensations and fabrics, the erratic heartbeat of
every subway pigeon in New York
who lies to itself about it's
own desensitization
but the trains still rattle
their bones and the quick winds
still tear through their feathers
and each day manages to feel
like sets of ten minutes that
each last a year.

he covered his
face and said
he loved me.

i am so mad at men
and I don't know why
is what I want to say
I'm almost positive it
is the redirected frustration
over what I couldn't control
gone rabid, but I am taking
it out on everyone and I don't
know how to

stop.

I thought for sure God had left me
when he laid his hand across my chest
and pressed in--what a peculiar feeling,
of hurting, but not really hurting, of
breathing, but not really breathing,
I laid there barely gasping, fingers
rapping against my sternum,
trying to break through to
hold my heart, just to hold
it, just to pull the weeds
from their vice grip and
feel it quiver, then quake,
then
roar.

i drew myself
a crown of marigolds,
I am trying to see the me
that others say exists.

Those houses are gold across the water
citrine streaked and royally gorgeous
a bit like mermaid hair under the boats
there's a story i can't quite remember
A little boy and the sun whom he loves
every evening she'd paint the windows
for a while they'd be a splendid kind of beauty to see

'oh what wonderful things must be behind that window'

he had so much hope for things that disappeared but
never failed to return

i would like to tell him
that i would not have
documented these things
if I had known it all would end so soon
I would not have kept track of the firsts
of his hands, or his movements or
the profile of his face with the Sangre De Cristos
rising up behind him, how I thought he must
be a part of the land.
of the steady
way I was p r o b a b l y
falling in love

Oh, i'm far too soft
in a warm beer kind
of way, won't burn
when I go down,
no heart-of-dixie
kind of wild, and I'd
only climb into your lap
when the truck's in park,
and only then just to tease
because my hips probably
do a thing or two--but I've
never had the chance to
let someone in on my
secrets, on the road map
to my thighs, and how I
hardly keep quiet--
but I got bible verses for
fingers although the holy
spirit won't seep through,
know lots of things about
the revival in Wales and not
much out of the log tucked into your
visor-- I'm not as scared as
I seem, just ***** easily, if you'd
just wait, if you'd just wait at the
bottom of the hill, I'll eventually
come down, I give everything
too much thought, but commit
100% when I've got the answers,
and sometimes I do, sometimes
i've got the answers, so the wind's
whipping up the dirt and pickin'
up my hair and i must look like
something crazy, but I'm not
I'm not,


I go down smooth.

on the county road
123, horizontal to my
window pane, it runs
along the dry grass
and some teenage
boy rolls down it
his bass a hushed
thump in the night
he's the bump in the
night, and his taillights
leave red streaks in the
black.

I want you to make me feel naked everywhere

saying things that make necks hot, face hot

don't have to be so ******, don't have to touch

Want to? Do so, though, don't be so mechanical

swim on, flow on, spill on, no pushing

the things said should tear open, pop seams

wonder what's inside,  beating

running, ebbing, draining, no inspecting, no prodding

a thorough investigation with  eyes, words

make the most difference, words dig the farthest

fill the fastest, reach to ends that previously had

no end

the end

I cry out:

I cannot do this
without you, ******.

my own strength
is not sufficient.

I'm not sure time
heals everything,
but eventually after
we have thought about
it so  much, it becomes
routine and routines
are easier and easier
the more that you
do
them.

the milky way is around
100,000 light-years across
which means that, traveling
at the speed of light, it would
take 100,000 years to cross
omitting the theory of
relativity.

I've been dreaming about
going far away.

I realize here and there
that he is trying to fit me
through a hole with gold
flower curtains and rafters
that brush my face nightly
and I scratch the windows
that don't open in white
dresses, wear this, he
says, wear this and
dance.

How come my dreams
won't let me realize
i'm dreaming?

Lit stage; a petty thought
I realize every day that
I cannot please everyone

there is nothing quite like a
warm body with a soul, they
breathe and gurgle beneath
you. how could something so
fragile exist and love and feel
the things they do, how does
something so beautiful end
up between your arms,
how do we find these
others, these people
these pieces?

I am just as bad
as you keeping
the wounded as
they are, Chaz.
Does this mean
I am the villain
as well?

Queen of the fallen tree and the gneiss ridden
shore, ruling over an empire of celadon
moss and early spring waters, you stand off
to the west (of me) and i see your breath shift
over your lip and dissipate in loose tendrils against
the evening sun

I catch him staring up at the trees arced over
our heads with a strange boyish grin,
this is sorta what I imagine my life to look like he says
all this **** in the way and then beyond that it's clear.
He wipes his hand across the sky as if to illustrate the
supposed clarity beyond the tangle of branches.  I am startled,
I meet his gaze briefly and nod because
if not a mess or entanglement, what better way to
describe the way I feel than to elude to the bracken
and brushwood ?

Out across a wire fence, deer gather quietly and stand
stock-still as we pass, aloof if not for their big inquiring eyes
watching us smirk and bump shoulders because
we don't know how else to be close (I already tried my tricks).
But he surprises me now and again with his gregariousness
with a determination to get to but an equal pleasure in
idling, in stillness, in gliding across my instep, performing
quick studies on my nails or briefly succumbing to the shadow
beneath my collarbone--

Quite arbitrarily, i ask for his pocket knife
but it's him that carves our initials into the
snarl at my feet, his hood pulled close
around his neck as he sets to work
Bis now with those hands that
have been kilned and slipped
with engobe, I am stirred
stirred
stirred
and
awake
awake
and
afraid.

yes ma'am
no ma'am
and they
even stepped
aside at the
door, i guess
i could go back
to being a country
girl.

he is leaving again
like the first time, I
am not buried in his
shirts anymore, his
hair is cut, his arms
are stained and I am
still fervently angry
without knowing why
why, why, and worst
of all I do not know
where I am going or
who i am meant to be
and it is all very awful
he's leaving, and I want
him to forget about me
please just forget about

me.

A pound per grudge
45% lean body mass.