There are not enough
   poems about manatees
If you are interested in human
   rights being kicked like a dog
   and justice being dragged
   through mud, you can find it
If you are interested in love
   that aches with a “burning
   heart” or a “bleeding soul”
   you can find it
If you are interested in death
   that holds out its hand
   to you like relief, or takes
   one too early, you can find it
But where, I ask, do you find
   a badger in a turtleneck?
Or a cup of coffee that doesn’t
   sound so self important?    
If you’re interested in the
   ocean or the sea or maybe
   a single “crushing wave
   of emotion,” you can find it
If you’re interested in God
  dying to save you, or God
  abandoning you to the darkness
  you can find it
If you’re interested in athletics—
   especially running towards
   dreams and horizons—and
   losing and winning, you can find it
But where, I ask, do you find
   a good left-handed centipede?
Or a wonderful, ice cold beer that
   doesn’t turn into alcoholism?
If you want to find a poem about
   how the “gray rain spills from
   the clouds like the pain”
   you can find it
If you don’t want to find a poem
   about rain you’ll still find it
   (cause those rain poems
   are everywhere)
If you’re looking for a poem
   about regret and forgiveness
   and cruel mercy making false    
   promises, you can find it
But where, I ask, do you find
   a barbarian ballerina?
Or a cigarette whose smoke doesn’t
   outline the shadows of a lost soul?  
Show me these things, show me
   a fat manatee, and I will finally
   take a deep breath and smile

It had been scorching from a time I can’t seem to recall anymore and lately your words had been ice cold but instead of saving us you held your breath and jumped off this burning ship into waters I refused to swim in. Inevitability is talk of the future but no one can see past the choices they don’t understand so I’ve been standing under a gray sky instead trying to cheer the clouds up with echoes off a sweet tongue that fall on absent company. The sky may be out of reach so instead I’ll reach for the stars in hopes that I touch a cloud on the way who may join tears with mine as we douse your lingering flames. What will be left of this broken ship worries me not for I know it will still move. Where it drifts I cannot say, but I understand now that perhaps sailing to nowhere may just be the perfect place to find myself.

I skipped some passion
There was a moment when words pulsed
Through my veins
And instead of letting the blood flow from my finger tips
I pent it up
Instead of penning it out

Girl, you're crazy

So, it's late
I'm late to class
The funeral's started
And my ship's just set sail
And as the wave get choppier
I realize that I'll never get there
No use fighting the ocean, right?
Divine intervention

I have no time to give
And no hour worthwhile
And every minute is a breath
Every second is nice touch

There's candlelit dinners awaiting
in the silence of drawn curtains and misery
Someone asked me to build God

No one asked me anything

Mix little lies and lots of truth
Call it a serum for relations

She says the truth is so dark
I think of pitch blackness

Have I mentioned I find comfort in the blackness of night?
Get that anonymity

Swallow to let it hurt you
Spit it out to let me know
I swear I'm ready to understand,
You just need to let me.

autumn found us in bed, hungry
and left us staring wide eyed at the ceiling
wondering for rain.

the sun tries too hard in this town, it is
so dry.
and every shower shorter, every
raincloud thinner.

sometimes I don't know what to do.

we spent six weeks
trying to bring back the flame
but oh, it would sputter
and you treated it like a child.
which one should never do.


I sent a bus for us, sent us
packing
sent a letter by regular post
spent two weeks trying to recreate
in ink
the portrait of the rain of you of the bus stop.

I set the table for dinner
and I sit, and I stand
and I am drawn out for the winter
if it won't rain then it must burn
if it won't burn then it must rain.

I saw snow this morning for the first time in forever ago and
said a silent prayer
to the beast and the bereft and the preternaturally on fire and
wasn't sure whether I was addressing land or sky
but I was brought back to the time
you pleaded with me
to, for you, recall please a single happy memory
and when I couldn't you cried.

and I can't explain how it's so
like snow that comes to rest in the sky.

I'm just saying that sometimes the mind fails
sometimes the best of us are fickle, fallow, fake
sometimes the sky sends water into the grave.
but the ceremony goes on anyway.

sometimes there is so much a body can take.
sometimes the volcano decides
that we, all of us, should shake.
and the ceremony goes on anyway.

Egg cell boy was
nurtured in a
test tube home.

What he was rested
on shelf after shelf,
a museum to himself.

Hawk eye dreams
stayed stale in a thick rimmed
case of glass and class,

though he never
saw what was in
front of him:

a blind love that
would not materialise
into anything but,
time wasted under sheet and cover,
and some lies to warm that
comic book heart of yours.

Teetles tuppled storpidly, along the clurby path
Her toes gribbed at the plirky sand
When she lumbled swanuously round the ragthall pebbly wrath
Her stlilting head tipped back as she breathed the roopled frand

She trippered toinulously pausing at the gurgil streef
To drink slaverously from a Burbore skinned flask
Sea shells stolen plumberlingly from the Briley Heef
Dripped from her pockets as she svointered on the shubbled crask

And in her furling hand she snatched a Stoodle,
Feathered little spine smuffled from the wind so grabbily,
Its beak produced a little snawdoodle
And she laughed so jorbid and trabbily

“Little one, a seashell for you”
She exclaimed and stooped to pluck a sleemish one
And in the Stoodle horpled with a gentle twoo
And she set it in the blurkish sea, spinning loorfilly in the sun

With a sudden shloop
both shell and Stoodle were ****** under
so she stood waiting peering into the gloop
as the Stoodle sunk into the murky punder

Then up the Stoodle popped with sloopish swriss
But Stoodle it was no more, instead a brilly Havergrath
With grey silk back and wuverbul muscles twriss
A smarmy smile upon its jarby grath

And she smiled back at him
A korky, vubblious thing
And he flipped through the air with krim
As one only a Havergrath can bring

--Lily