my thoughts
are like snow
falling
on an old roof

Like breath,
people feel distance.

Away, far: light sleep,
falling feels forgotten. We’ve
really make
love. Days. Words. Sky.

Morning: dark.
Stay solid,
eat remoteness. Space:
impending decline.
Children asleep long:
Hands. Eyes.

Tongue won’t

slow stagnant works.

Dana: there’s skin, bed, today.
Snow we’d make.

Land, air, sun… wrote rain.
Running, tired, west.
Cold winter half started.
‘Sweat’, says summer.

Gonna, moments ago, die.
Hit. Lie. Believe.


Broken. Felt. Sat. Lives hurt.
Fragile tomorrow wind:
Hell outside.


        ****** flowers.
        Eat brittle regret ***.


Lima couldn’t Damian;
break wave forever.
Kind times, leaving wondering days.
Dead drive; fly hard, wishing legs.


        Lights turned bones.
        Growing rich soon, lines
        raised: broke fog.
        Easy fighting names.

Drove car. Dinner. Worked.
Survive Monday, certainly.

Hung grief. Drank *******.
Expect usual ceremony rocket:
Sarah. Puck. ******* Cusco.
Connor, Corey: we’ve gone.


        Stone **** hot soft body.
        Dying, wanting. Undress.


Tied. Nights used.
Dawn gave secret pause,
Painting blood poems:
likely self story.
Gods weak, fall asleep.
Surely meaning darkness happen.
Suppose **** stayed, brought knowing?

Shower…
Mountain hair.
True thousand strings, grasp getting
Gently heard. Endless floor.

Sand.

we've all been hit one too many times with information we couldn't process

and then three to eight days later you're sitting in class
or another insignificant coffee shop trying to calculate how many ways
you could die by fourpm when your clockwork mess of neuron pathways
finally catches up and then-

your hands are shaking and you can't tell if it's the day old coffee
or the information that has finally stuck long enough
for you to realize it for what it is
and the words that brought everything down around you
are rattling in your rotten skull making it pound
and you can't ignore it anymore (it's not the coffee)

bad news has a way of tearing down
every cleverly placed brick and marble wall
until your core is exposed and everything
you thought you knew so well means **** all
and there is never someone standing by, red alert, when it finally hits
so you're on your own kid

because not even mom realizes that your movements are stiff and your eyes are red
and not even mom realizes that you haven't slept in four days
and you've started wearing long sleeves again


the coffee is cold and you're placing bets
("my brother is missing")
on how many days it will take for your hands to shake

she's barely an inch taller - but still taller -
squinting at the horizon line and heaving tobacco smoke
through resin coated lungs that should belong to a
fourty three year old smoker, not an eighteen year old
graduate

she laughs the loudest when others cast glances
and hushed whispers
and never misses the chance to tell you
she couldn't possibly give less
of a ****

she likes convenience store mints;
the round white ones you'd find
at the bottom of grandma's purse that tasted like
dust and chemically sweetened perfume,
and home

she went to a school where "****"
was spat like poison at her feet
but knew exactly what to say when three girls
cornered her, knew exactly how to throw her
words like fists

she gets hives from cats and grass and
practically anything outside her door
so she spends most of her time inside,
only leaving to have another
cigarette

she listens to tool and radiohead
and smokes half a joint before bed to help her sleep
but she still doesn't; not for long
and she twitches as her brain drifts in and out of
consciousness

she will tell you if you will listen
accept her head space and back off
just enough for her to breathe
because god--she needs to breathe as much as she
possibly can

I do not claim to know her,
after no more than 42 days do I have any idea
why she will drink a bottle of gin like it's water
or why it takes intoxication to show any kind of
affection

but I know what it's like to wake up at 5am
and find her sitting on the floor beside your bed
and in silence watch the sun rise
before going back to sleep
together

and I know what it takes to make her laugh
to stimulate and stir whatever is left
of the emotion she spent years destroying
and how her mouth tastes like fire and loss
and hope

I do not claim to know a lot
but I think I know how to make this beautiful ghost
of a person happy

and that
is enough

Part one

my understanding of youth was
interrupted vignettes, I guess.
the little moments overlapsed the
greater moves like
deciding to move to Canada.
or learning I could *******.

but all that sticks is little toys
received at Christmas, the
talking plastic face we tried to
stuff down in the side storage of the
family van on a long drive to the far
east coast.

the way some jellyfish stung my leg and
realizing there existed a kind of pain
that patience could will away.


but I had to go to England for a month.  to get outside myself.
coincidentally meeting up with a girl who'd
read my poems, thought them ok.
spent two days, stupid, with what we thought were romantic notions.

then walked that old dog through endless English fields
inhaling my hands incessantly until the scent at last had dried away.


I am a different person now.

But back then I walked till my feel hurt, then
collapsed in a city I'd never been, and
Only lamented the complications I'd caused
when she dragged me back to Lockerly again.  

Made bacon, warmed bagels, softened cheese, poured wine
in a house, not mine, in the English countryside.  
Are these not the dreams, when young,  we live by?


She kissed me on the porch, on a bench,
the night before she caught the train.
(I remember I was sitting on the left. )
Inside later asking, politely, if she would undress.
And the next morning, new to this,
offering  breakfast.

We were sixteen, what did we know?
We'd listened to pop music from a small stereo and didn't have ***.
And that morning all I
could do was go with her to meet the train.    

Then keep walking that small dying dog
as if he could fill in the rest.


Part Two (interlude)

She visited my parents' house later that season in a summer dress.
We sat at the dining room table, for maybe an hour,
Making small talk, and then she left.
That was the first time she'd worn a dress.


Part Three*

I came back from college wanting to do something stupid, so we
Put on headlamps and invaded the sewers, skewered
the brickwork waded in filth I thought
Who, if anyone, would follow someone through this mess?

Then we drank one beer each from our
sewage-soaked sacks, went to the unrenovated room
my parents had reserved, sheetboard and a mattress...
In case I ever came back.

We watched Perfume, the film, on a laptop, then had ***.
I guess.
I mean it was
***, but so much less. Less than the painting I had in my head.
Less than the time we ran away to France.
Less than four years of high school.
Less than a glance.

We woke around ten.  Dressed. She
looked me in the eyes with what I didn't know was goodbye.
Shook my hand, and left.


But in those first few half lidded moments
(when dreams are hit with light and turned to steam)
when you know what's coming next but first must find a missing sock, must
scan the room for evidence

When naked in bed and sober now and so
confused yet actualized at least lifted to
meet the north window winter light when this
immovable stone of a woman rose
put her
hands on my shoulders and coward-like kissed me from behind


I threw everything I thought I knew at
something I'd no right to know. Her
dark skin, her skinny fragile frame. With I
so grossly white in the December light. Wanting
everything, too young
to know what yet.

You know who you are.
You who laid there.
You who, raised up,
Placed lips on my my right shoulder, from behind.

You who kissed me in the back.

Then clasped your bra and
quickly dressed. Didn't want breakfast.
and before my stepmom could notice: left.


Several years have passed. I've

Maybe never felt loved like that.

The cranes cling along the sea cliff
yellow spiders perhaps made skittish
by the rolling morning mist.
they swing and strain with (do I detect?)
a nervous urgency until
noon
when the sun half shines through
to draw the fog and warm
fragile yellow exoskeletons.

There are plastic bags now in the dog parks, cameras
grow on top of poles.
Exercise equipment planted in the gardens, at the edge of the sea
(certain I would have noticed them before).

These towers must be taller, then.
I've seen them at work for a year and a half,
they must be–
with all that nervous energy.
Tire tracks from heavy trucks.
A bent rail, discarded candy bar.
Morning sand on the sidewalk
where secret midnight bricks were laid.
And here, maybe, a new banner flies:
"Se vende." To sell oneself.
To give oneself away.

I have lost my voice as of late,
feeling like prospero living in the island of my mind.
Here's an attempt to describe how I pass my time.*

there are moments when the ache overcomes the present
the scratching demon inside, selfish for something I can’t pronounce
and I find myself swallowing my tears over black coffee, hoping you don’t see.

I look into your hazel eyes and see the frustration with age.
you tell me, ‘I hate being old’
and I quietly tell you to embrace your wisdom
‘you’re only old once, nana’
you laugh and I find my place inside your sweet warble
as we look around for the keys that you just put in your purse.

the small girl within me reaches out and holds your shoulder lightly
guiding you in and out of the slow traffic swimming in southern humidity.
everything has slowed down in the past few months
the decaying town I grew up in is full of molasses minded folk,
and I only wish it was slower as you forget why we are here.
We walk into the the cool air and I tell you we needed to leave the house.
you’ve been folding the dishes and scrubbing the laundry while my grandfather yells about the TV and his inability to find his mind when they put another persons heart inside his chest.
we decide to leave behind the scene of you sobbing in the sink
and drink some black coffee.

You and I have sat so many times
wrapped in fits of laughter
defying the pain of the world.
I try to make simple jokes as an excuse to lose ourselves,
but my new silence has grown with the summer honeysuckle
and I have lost the desire to forget.
We sit side by side, watching the black water slide inside the creek.
You begin telling me how you finally feel relaxed.
I kiss your cheek and tell you I love you.
We smile, no longer needing to grasp for breathless laughter.
The ache becomes a part of every moment
and I breathe in the golden sadness of mortality,
knowing that I am learning the art of dying
in southern heat of the town I was born.

I, too, can write passion poems:

(and if you were a rose I'd pick you and stick you
in water till you withered and died and
everyone would comment
on your color
and refined shape.)

so let's collide with night through our noses:
wake to your banging fist on my swinging door
and binge on bad ideas and beatless songs
till distended with poetry we grow ill and collectively
**** sunsets onto those 365 well-ruled pages
        that we pray to in pews in this church of hedonists--
        every book a bible, all manuals for *******.

so at dawn we
criticize the sunrise, hang ourselves
from the belltower, for kicks.
or lash limbs together under covers,
those well-rehearsed kisses
a myriad of plots:

and with our bony fingers,
tie the sumblimest of knots.

Certain rhythms will provoke ghosts
in old attics reeking with romance.
That eternal prayer
found in complete silence,
begs sinners to break purity.

Mortal breathes begin to dance between lips,
creating poetry in sacred space.
The momentary awareness of another,
who craves the absorption of your soul.

**** me into your lungs darling.
I'll translate centuries of painful wisdom
stirring in the temple of my bones.

These truths begin a home
in our late night dialogues
circling around dangerous pasts,
all those golden, fatal blades.

As we make our way back to the red light of sleep,
the attic leans in to touch our skulls.
We respond with agony and laughter.

I slide into sleep,
forgetting all I need to find in your mind.
Accepting the fingerprints
as you press my identity upon your tongue.
The restless goddess within my nature
swallows the mortality
in tonight's poetry.

But this never lasts.
Love is a distraction,
an intoxication meant to entertain that ego who loves deficiency,
a selfish voice who finds herself every morning in front of a decaying mirror
and blames the lack of other.

Learn to leave the fear behind.
You alone are whole.
There is poetry sewn into your veins.
Underneath that sacred silence
there is an original symphony
waiting to find the medium of your complex truth.