your mouth speaks like fountains,
gray and cold and hardened by
the cement in your earlobes,
like when latitudes cannot seem
to find longitudes and
how nothing goes your way.
but i can't seem to place
your complaints, like the satellites
can search for landmarks,
how the light searches for the dark,
i guess you have worries
******* into a bouquets colored in
unfortunate crime series,
similar to nancy drew.
i always knew i read those books with
patience for a reason.
negative comforts you with
its energies and wide open
grace,
having its own race that will
love you and love you all over again
because you are uncertain anyone
else will but
i can't give you a stable ground to
walk on or an idealist world
you know you cannot have.
everyone else has learned to live,
working with the works and hands
they've been dealt.
you just constantly ask for it,
you aren't a king,
hardly a man.

things like this always take time.

i woke up today to the world
drinking tea and chaos,
as if nothing has changed,
like the ground hasn't collided and
caused the water to rise or the
fact that the government just may not
care about us at all.
the debt we are in could last us a century,
and i'm not talkin' about the government funds,
i'm worried about how luck is never on our side
of the dead green grass but,
we can get through this.
i've never been one for religion, so
when i catch myself saying that i have faith,
it's feels like marbles in my mouth and
the glass is melting to form
a sculpture of how we could be
little or we could be big,
but only time will tell in between the seconds,
and that moment we know which we are,
i'll turn to you and tell you if the faith
is still crashing on my bad days
and i hope you'll stick around if it isn't.
if you don't stay, the earth may quake
close to a 8.5 and it will go down in history of
how difficult it was to piece back
my grounds.
so even if the world stops spinning,
i'll still spin it for you like when you used to pay
for my admission and walk me to my doorstep,
like there was nothing more dangerous
than leaving traces of my footsteps across my dewy
lawn.
i'll spin it like the beer bottle with the foam
settling at the bottom, just so i can see
something fluid move because
sometimes being fluid is more beautiful than being
solid since solidity only has one shape.
so once you tell me that you won't be there to spin my bad days
to good,
i'll leave you alone, like i would the dead
carcass of the deer we hit two days ago in your rusty
volvo but don't be surprised if you ever
wonder if i dream about you
and when the answer is
only every once
in a
while.

my thoughts could run a power plant.
the electricity could sprint through telephone lines
in state lengths and i'm not sure if they would
stop there.
sometimes i feel lucky, like if i could dance enough
i could stop the earth from spinning like a halo and
whirl it from north to south;
maybe then i could find you again.
sometimes my thirst is so much,
my tongue flattens out to parchment paper and
i'm just waiting for your signature to guarantee
some water for a later date.
sometimes i can feel your heartbeat from
wherever you are, causing my own to hiccup
and man, do i hate the hiccups because
sometimes it hurts so much that i
retire to holding my breath.
sometimes when it works
i sometimes scold myself to
make improvements, not excuses
and with that i could almost
turn off and leave this position for
someone else.

the strangest thing happens to me when you are in a
50 mile radius of where i'm sitting.
it's almost like my tongue loses sensation and it is nailed
down to a board where signs can be hung.
and when i do speak, i stutter like skipping rocks and
broken records and lies, but
i never lie because my dad always told me to be honest.
so let me be honest with you,
and i'll let you into my mouth to take a look and see
the wasteland that holds the words like "hell"
but i was told soap would be my next meal if i ever would say it out loud.
now i can say such things because i'm not a little girl,
(i may be short with a short attention span and short patience),
but in my bones i'm taller than the empire state building
and you could always see the top like you discovered a new
love for star wars all over again.
and since i'm all grown up, i can tell you how i tangled things,
which i do a lot, because sometimes i get bored
or the timing is off,
but i hope for a comb to root up some of the knots.
and when my fifteen minutes come i will
shower you with light questions and
phrases that i want to hand out on a silver platter;
like, "i'm glad you are back in town" or
"i'm doing swell!"
and if you think this is about you, stranger,
it might be and we just haven't met but i really really really
hope this doesn't happen again.

but if it does,
please know that you provided the telescope so i could
learn how the body works and you may find that
really creepy.
it's not how it looks, i wouldn't lie to you.
so i level my eyes to peer through the belly of
a hot air balloon and the flame catches my
heart as it starts to flutter up
to the wires and fabric that delicately cradles the weight of
our bodies as if we are pink newborns,
thrown into this world with no knowledge of when things will get easy.
and i'll ask you politely to let me go, so no one will question
why i was with a stranger.

so i started this new hobby,
where i try to erase "bitter" out of every dictionary i
find, but sometimes it doesn't always disappear and it
sits there with eraser shavings in different shades of gray
like the collection of Polaroids i keep safe in my desk drawer.
in this occasion i will just take my handy - dandy sharpie
to color it in to leave it up to the imagination
or trial and error, like new cleaning products for the women
who are dissatisfied with being homebodies, but
i'm telling them not to be bitter, not to be this six letter word
because
28,835 days is an awful long time to carry
such an empty suitcase,
and if some of you don't understand that number,
an average woman's life expectancy is 79 years of age,
so i hope i calculated that correctly because i'm not so good at
math,
but i'm not saying all of us are average,
since sometimes we break too soon and the bitter takes
over the sweet like the winter takes over the fall, and
sometimes we are so free it gives us a few more days to really
feel alive.
i just don't want to be bitter, because the dictionary is filled with
so many other words like laugh and lust and flesh and
warmth.
so i think this book can do without just one word.

i guess i'm just a dreamer,
i've always wanted to fly to the moon
and swim with jellyfish,
just to say i never was stung by the globes
of the water but someone always told me
to tread lightly,
like there was broken glasses that
could get me anytime, but
that didn't stop the birds from flights or
landings as electricity pushed through their legs and
the weather never stopped the wars we
all soon forgot about.
we are forgetful people, misplacing our keys
and hearts in the rooms where we felt the most in.

so when i go about my business (and the times
could go slow), i will reenter each
book to find each word
that could
someday
somehow
direct me to "i'm sorry."