Please spare me the boulder- push
I am strong but I’m not strong enough
Please give me a piano-key life
All our darks are above us
All our futures pale white
I imagine you forgive yourself and see my insides
How you were no match for a trick of the light
That I didn’t know ******* when you died
And sometimes you have to bleed
For worthy days
Peaceful nights

It is scrawny and starving
Kicking at its gate, gnashing it’s jaws at my hands and throat
Bleeding through the chains and hay
Collapsing only to wail through the roof and into the sky

I sit at the barn door and sob

But I love you,
So I don’t feed it and I watch it die.

Like your jaw knows anger,
Your feet know wet socks and creaking boards
Like hands know a hot kettle,
Kissed and pulled away to burn pink a while longer
Like an unshaven hunter, resentful of the forest but feeling home nowhere else,
You know my rivers and roses

How would your hair feel in my fingers
In a new world?
Or your stomach against my back,
In the twilight
Before any decisions can be made
In the lavender hours when we are vulnerable and un-expecting
Still mine, still yours,
Until we again become ourselves
Though feeling our own pulse
Through the other’s hand

There’s a world at the end of the earth for us
And I go there with you, even without you
Even when it’s beyond touch and sound
Too far beyond hope, begging, tender new start
I find it in the darkest part of the night
In our songs
In the sky above the bridge
In the city we’d never revisit
With anyone

I know what I did, I know what I did, IknowwhatIdid,
But you haven’t done enough to make me concede again and you never really have
So maybe I’ll beg
You know the more I try to love it,
The sicker it gets
Take my mouth away from me,
I don’t know how to use it
At least for how it’s intended
When I use it to scrape your soul from its shell like a cold-water clam
I’m the captain

Hands swift, taught, carving.
Aurora borealis on my open back
Thought we might name our girl the same
Crashing into the world with your eyes
Flashing green
Loud, humanly
Through our chests and the sky

All of the rivers that led us here
Began clear
We knew our way like our tongues know our teeth
Like losing a soul tears the muscle
Before it leaves