I drank of you.
And savored every sip.
I want all of you.
So I can savor every bite.
When you speak.
I stop the world..
So I can listen.
And savor every sound.
I feel the vibration.
I've waited way too long for you.
I want it all.
Give me all of you.
Just the way that it is..
Please no substitutes.


-Jennifer DeAngelo
Copyrighted 2016

on the rail, not far
from where a young woman jumped
to a lonely death in the cold bay
I found you, in the fog

someone's wedding ring
perhaps once cherished, intended to seal
an eternal bond, but now this band lay
alone, silent, still, on dumber steel

who left you there?
not the doomed woman, for she took her final leap
two Christmases before, and her ring was found
on her withered hand

soft rain began to fall,
like a million tears for forlorn lovers
yet I stayed on the bridge, frozen in time and place
not from the shivering shower

but by the sight of one round, gold trinket
left for fickle fate after another circle had been broken
forever, for my eyes to see, at the edge
of another promised eternity

tranquility and stars,
the earth gives way,
the drowning
of the dark,
your love-cries in
your sleep,
tender and then harsh
beneath a blanket
of dream.

You can’t really picture the place.  
You don’t recall who was there.

But you remember surprise
That human ashes are not powdery dust,
Apt to disintegrate like snow,
Or soft like bread cast upon the waters.

Dad’s ashes chafed your palms like jagged seeds
As you clutched fistfuls from a plastic purple box
And flung them down a hillside
Somewhere in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

And you remember the feeling of urgency
As you retreated up the hill.
You had motions to go through,
Space to occupy,
A black and white landscape to walk
Among small figures filing along a dirt track
In the airless September heat.