you're floating out in the sea, you're washing laundry,
strung and folded in the storm.

you want to crease your
jacket with the tide: it's black and grey like your limbs
and arteries.

but i wanted you to press against me. i wanted you
to give up, to say "i remember".

we're running out:
we're ***** and worn and no ocean can open our
rusted, rotting hearts.

i think you're waiting
for the decay.

you stare into the depths and let them float away.

we'll feel-
as collegiate corners
are filling the pages of
our tragedies.

i attempt to seek
next century's repose:
the motion of a thousand
spinning conjectures.

your restlessness holds
junction and duration,
consciously screaming of our
former years.

i'll seek-
you in oscillations
and what little you
left of memory.

red-breasted swallows chase
love on our
grave. She piles the earth, spoonful
by spoonful—

I see a torrent of brown
in her hair,
I see her dancing in the early
morning light.

true death and restless spirits
i remember all of their names
like they were mine
and the charity of cold
chimes forever
in a sea of salt

kicked down the cemetery gate
and kissed the ground
forgive me now
for the pain i caused
that night, canis minor wept
and all was dust

i am the one
who fell from dark
into an even greater void

walking towards the park
under open ladders
and
stepping on sidewalk cracks
and
passing black cats in broken mirrors
you will never
be rid of
me

she writes me a requiem
for our encounters, waving
like a flag outside in the yard.

i find her photographs and boots in
odd, less-frequented corners:

we'll never
decipher the scrawled handwriting.

I walk into the mirror box again and it’s as if my life
really is just an extension of my own metaphors.
I’m caught in the mirror maze, searching for something
in the mirrors at angles, but all I can see is myself,
my sad, stupid self, stretching on and on forever
with the same boring face, the same boring feelings,
again and again until I stop being able to make out the details.
Am I looking back at myself or am I looking forwards to the future?
Will it always be the same or has it merely been
the same since forever? I stare into the mirror tunnel
at all these selves repeating themselves,
forcing the years, the weeks, the days into the same strict patterns,
merely following the self that came before them, merely mirroring
the feelings, only doing it worse and worse with each new rendition.
It’s just me, I think, in the mirror box, caught up in myself
because I am selfish and horrible. I’m selfish and horrible
and I want to turn my back on myself but
how can I possibly do that in the mirror box?
I meet myself over and over, and it’s just me,
in all this vast, repetitive vagueness, just me in
this long stretch of lonely unsettledness that surely doesn’t end.
I want to smash my own face in, so I close my eyes
and try to think, maybe, maybe, maybe, because I don’t
want to be this grey-cloud self forever. I can’t be, and so maybe,
just maybe, somewhere beyond all these selves
there’ll be a day when I’m down on the shore
and the sea will be calm and the sky will be
faded purple. Love will not sink down into nothingness
because in the cool evening air,  my heart will be full
instead of gaping and my mind will be at ease
instead dwelling on it’s own boringness
or entangling itself in own self-created sadness.
And maybe, I’ll have abandoned my book
and its pages will be dry because I won’t have been crying into it.
They’ll be no mirrors, just the ocean,
glinting like an amethyst cluster in the half light
and I’ll rest my head on the shoulder of the girlfriend
I'll meet someday and I’ll smile in this beautiful liminal moment
and nothing will be tainted by the dread of returning home.
We’ll kiss – on the shore – and rewrite it forever and
maybe the stars will fall out of the sky when I shake it and
all my trains will run on time and all the wounds
in the world will heal simultaneously.
It’s a moment surely stolen from someone else’s poetry,
but I’ve got to cling to something to avoid becoming
lost entirely in all this dark, intangible vagueness.
There’s got to be at least one imaginary moment
that isn’t just me, reflected over and over.
There’s got to be one moment that doesn’t stare
back at me from inside the mirror box.