In the blink of an eye,
our life is gone.
We live the days,
pretending they don't run out.

Death promises us one thing.
It is a final justice.
We beg, and we ask,
and in the end, it delivers.

Fair or not fair,
there's equality in death.
To postpone or meet halfway,
the grave is patient.

Like soap, your poetry cleanses my soul.
On paper, I'm filthy from your touch,
and your honey is sticky on my fingers.
But, your words and your laugh are a spring
that douses me in bubbles and gold.
I sip from your tears and sweat,
and youth revitalizes my skin and bones.
You are an oil that enriches
and cannot be rinsed away with water.
You are the dirt that gets under by fingernails
and houses the seeds of a hundred flowers.

Night comes for us all.
We watch as color and saturation leak from the world
until just a half sphere peaks in the horizon.
When the sky touches down and up rises the moon,
it is only its reflective glow that we have to light our walks.

Night comes for us all.
Whereas stimuli and light override my senses,
the coolness and silence of night dampens them,
and with it, my thoughts race.
As my body relaxes against cool sheets,
my mind is buzzing,
and my heart tiptoes from one place to another.

Night comes for us all.
United but separate, our experiences are the same.
We look at the same moon and spy the same stars.
We linger on the same wishes,
and in the anonymity that darkness grants,
we dream and ponder and hope
that something hears us, sees us.
And in that dark anonymity of night,
that subtle weight we constantly carry grows,
and we are anchored to the Earth’s core.

Night comes for us all.
We wait for it to pass,
yet every day, we welcome it gladly
for rest or fresh eyes.
It is a gift and a gurney,
a calm and a casket.
Night is what we make it,
and night is what we need it to be.

I always thought relationships ended with anger,
but you know they say the opposite of love is apathy.

Like the death you confront after your fall from religion,
there is no fear, nostalgia, or sadness - just a void.

To not be thought of is to be dead.

I'll become like that pesty buzzing in your ear
that reminds you every now and then there's a fly in your house.

I'll ask if you remember those times together,
and you'll look past me like a foreign stranger asking directions.

You won't even need to say goodbye because you said it a hundred times to yourself.
When you finally say it me, you'll be hanging up the phone, but I'll be crumbling under all the weight of what was left to be said.

My mom and I
sat talking at a coffee shop
for six hours.
We'd never gotten along
so well.
We discussed all the good things,
marriage, babies, degrees.
We said this in a world of
divorce, death, debt.
I said,
I wonder what awful thing
will happen next.

And suddenly, as if waking from a child's dream,
I am thrown into reality,
not awoken softly by my mother's warmth
but startled and bewildered to find her not there.
I exit the hazy surrealness of midnight rendezvous,
and the disillusionment snakes its way around my heart.
As if struggling to find my breath or finding myself alone,
I am starkly confronted yet again with my naiveté.
I am transformed into that little girl who trusted so easily,
and now, it is not just disappointment but also shame
that, like a vapor, evades every corner of my being.
To have believed in a dream and my own competence,
I am still that foolish little girl who never learned.
Perhaps, the worst part of gullibility is the knowledge
that the fool and the fooled will always be you.