I'm laying in a field of dead flowers
waiting for them to grow back

I've spent months on my knees praying for a miracle  
I've spent months watering flowers that were already dead

I'm laying in a field of dead flowers
thinking of all that could've been

remembering how they once flourished
remembering all that was done and said

I'm laying in a field of dead flowers
unable to move

to scared to leave it all behind
to tired to peruse  

I'm laying in a field of dead flowers

because there's nothing else I can do

I wake up on your side of the bed
cold, without you to bring sunlight
to dandelion bones, shaken by the
violent winds
and dimmed stars that sew our
eyes shut, together and then apart
like children on swing sets
on a warm summer night.

blow these dandelion bones far
apart and into the sky
till I’m void of anything but
battered skin and galaxy bruises
till I’m nothing but
everything.

Cover up the moon and the stars
A hurtful veil over my widening sky
A vengeful malicious intent
A never reason

It should be raining

Listen to the murmur in the crowd
The way the thunder grows louder
And the skies grow dimmer
As we await the storm

Cover up the sun
The clouds grow gray in anger
And the atmosphere becomes thick
And the land becomes dark

It should be raining

A ****** shroud
All that dream are disavowed
The thunder claps grow loud
The clouds are angry

Because they never could be the sun

It should be raining........

I watched my father scrunch his eyebrows together
whenever my mother said something he didn't like,
his impatience seeping through his dark skin,
apparent in the way he turned his body away
as if he wanted to run from all this
but he's trapped now, trapped forever.
I listened as my mother told me she did not want to stay
and my brother and I are the only things anchoring her unto this godforsaken house
of peeling white paint and crumbling walls and endless shouts and burning words.
I watched them hold each other when things got tough
and I knew it wasn't because of love—
it was because they were the nearest things to each other.
At a very young age I knew love was something that dissolves,
a flower you water everyday,
a story you never stop writing,
And some people, they don't know,
that they have stopped watering,
and they're running out of ink, only on page 3.
Little girl me knew.
Big girl me continues to watch it unfold,
dead petals in their hair
and dark ink between their fingers—
dry

I lie awake with thoughts of you occupying my mind

And I know that dialing those ten familiar numbers would get you here in a matter of minutes because it’s only 2:04am and you rarely ever sleep before 3.

But I will forbid myself to pick up the phone

Because although I would love to feel safe and secure I know it will just make it harder in the end.

How can I be at home yet feeling so incredibly homesick?


I try again to remember blissful moments

Moments before things got complicated and stressful

Like when you traveled thousands of miles to meet my little brother.

Or when we danced at a country bar in a small town to music we didn’t even know and enjoyed the company of people twice our age.

Or memorizing each other’s orders at every café, breakfast bar and ice-cream shop we went to.


I try to remember occasions before the shadows of your past made constant appearance in your character,

And those very shadows caused the very arguments that broke the one thing I was sure couldn’t be broken.


Now it’s 2:12am and nothing’s changed,

Just another night spent obsessing over what used to be.


R.M.

Positivity is a wave
which sweeps the surface;
laps at my feet
to then melt
like i did at my mother's
by the fireplace in winter,
then disappear
much like the fireplace
and her warm feet.

Anxiety also lies close to the shore;
it is the wave that throws itself
against the rocks.
I am the rock.

There is a fair bit of you in every garden of my life.
Truly, that is nothing extraordinary, you should know it as objectively as I do.

Nevertheless, there is something I’d like to clarify:

When I say "in every garden”,
it is not only in relation to this of now,
this of waiting for you, of hoorah! i found you!, and ******! i lost you!,
and found again, and hopefully stops there.

Nor in regard of you suddenly telling me "I’m going to cry”,
then with a discrete lump in my throat "well go ahead”.
And then a graceful invisible rainfall arrives to assist us,
perhaps the reason the sun rises unhesitatingly right after.

I’m not just referring either
at the day-to-day fluctuation of the stock in our little decisive complicities,
or that I could or believe I can turn my deficiencies to victories,
or of you to bestow upon me the tenderest gift of your most recent despair.

No.
The situation is more serious.
When I state “in every garden” I mean to say that in addition to that sweet cataclysm,
you are also rewriting my childhood,
that age when one utters "grown up” and solemn phrases,
and the solemn grown ups celebrates them,
and conversely, you think of it irrelevant.

What I mean to say is,
you are reassembling my adolescence,
that time when I was an old man full of insecurities,
and contrarily, you know how to extract from there,
my germ of joy and consciously spread it.

What I mean to say is,
you are stirring my youth,
that vain vessel no one took hold of, that proud shade no one got close to,
and you on the other hand knows very well how to shake it
until the autumn leaves start falling
till there is nothing but the flesh of my triumphless truth.

What I mean to say is,
you are grasping my maturity,
that mixture of stupor and experience,
this unknown horizon of fear and certainty,
this relentless faith on my questionable strength.

As you can see, it is serious,
extremely more serious.
Because with these or different words,
I mean to say you are not only,
the dearest girl you are,
but also the splendid and cautious* women that I love and have loved.

Because thanks to you E, I have understood,
(you’d say it was about time, and with reason),
that love, is a beautiful and generous bay, that lightens and darkens as life goes by,
a bay where ships arrive and break away,
they arrive with blossoms and presages,
and they part with krakens and storm clouds.
A beautiful and generous bay where ships set down and then leave,

But E, you, please don’t leave.

The air is incredibly thin.
I can’t breathe, and my
hands are shaking.

When I was a boy,
a playmate hit me
in the head with a
glass ashtray.

In an instant,
my father had snatched
the boy up and carried him
****** outside, suspended
by one ankle.

I’ve heard also,
stories of my great-uncles
two brothers, run out of
Saint Louis County
because they’d fought in and
been banned from every tavern
on both sides of every main drag,
of every township therein.

Maybe that’s where this
comes from.

There is a fire inside that
most days is only embers,
but stokes far too easily into
infernal inferno.

The grey mush in my skull is
jacked into some electricity
with jumper-cables made from
too many sour thoughts,
a fierce depression, and
huge piles of self-doubt.

Gladness, contentedness,
feels like fraud, like failure,
like not leaning into it sturdily
enough.
Like not staring into The Abyss hard
enough.

It feels like obscenity to
not see conflict,
to not rail against
some dark thing,
some enemy.

In doing so
is found the ability to
feel like
enough.

But,
what
is
enough?

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

Silence
Silence was key,
That's the only way she could be,
That's what they taught her to be,
That's what she needed to be,
She needed the survival,
She needed the head space,
She needed the long lonely nights trapped in her head,
She needed it for her sanity,
Her silence was to be the death of her,
Her silence caused her ending,
She never allowed words to leave her mind,
So she drowned in the feelings she hid.

I brought your favorite flowers again
Tulips blue and yellow
Laid them down before you
Adding to all the rest

You’re running out of room
It’s starting to look more like a garden
Than a grave

I would stop bringing them
But I don’t feel that they are enough
They don’t convey the amount of how much I love you
And that you are missed