They say to love
you must first love yourself
for without that you
have no foundation to build.

Which is to say my love is sacrilegious
for the hollow within me
has always remained hollow
but I have not stopped loving.

I have loved the misty rivers
on the cool mornings before the sun.
I have loved the turning of pages
and things laying upon them.

And for what is worth I loved her
even if it was only for a moment,
even if it was a mistake,
don’t you dare call it phantom.

My love is a blanket even if
I have not yet learned
how to fold myself in it
It is still real.

I still bathe it in the river
I still call it mine even though
I do not consume its fruits,
its flesh is not plastic.

One day I may fill what is mine to fill,
but til then I will not stop
with what you call “unholy loving”
because it is all I know how to do.

As the sun sets tonight
I can not help but envy it,
envy that it does not have to witness the dark,
envy that it does not have to hold the knife,
envy that once it passes below the horizon it will bleed no more.

My God, how I wish I was the sun,
to know that tomorrow I will rise again.
My God, how I wish I knew I had tomorrow
or at least a tomorrow where the scars will no longer be there
to remind me how I built this house myself.

But still, I am sitting here,
watching the sun die wishing I could too.
I do not have noble words for this,
I do not have a ready solution.
So I sit here praying to see tomorrow’s sun.

This time, unlike the other times
you are not sure you can
drag this tired body back to the shore,
you're not even sure it is worth the trouble.

After the long calm the storms return
with the wrath of the gods behind it;
how can a mortal man withstand
such a hopeless battle?

Yet in the midst of moonless night
she came and gave life to my barren lungs
how could I not think she would stay
even when storms raged on.

Now she is gone like the others
but this time I do not know if
I can survive on my own
like the times before last.

God forgive me for loving
her while she was here
and God forgive me for
hating her now she is gone.

How great is my envy
that when the curtain
finally set
you did not look back,
no matter how hard I prayed,
you never look back.

Do not call this love unholy
or unrequited
or even a phantom ship.

It was given freely
without reservation
without contemplation.

I built it in the quiet hours
before dawn while the
world still slept.

Still it was not enough
for someone who confuses
me as a simple chimera.

Yet I do not know how else
to live but to wait
in the widow watch.

I cannot say if the ship
will come into port,
yet still I hope it does.

I hope one day this love
can find a home here,
I cannot image it anywhere else.

Someday maybe
I’ll write a letter to the moon,
just to say I too
know how it feels to chase the sun.
How I too know what it means to hope
that someday this brokenness will be enough.

And someday maybe
I’ll have daughters with their mother's smile
And they will know I built this house for them,
They will know I already love them
Because even now I am waiting by the shore
for the ship that will bring their mother.

And someday maybe
Those girls will have brothers
who will dream of long forgotten chivalry,
I pray I can teach them that much,
I pray they carry not my burdens,
even so I will leave them my poems.

And someday maybe
I will die like Jacob,
surrounded by this noble house we built.
With the hope of heaven,
With the hope their love will be enough to redeem,
with the hope of once again waiting for them with the moon.

I myself am nothing more
than a dream of a dandelion seed
which floats endlessly onward
without teleology.

How I envy the river which bathes me,
for what do rivers know of want?
When she bleeds she overflows,
perhaps that is all she has to teach.

Yet before the river, I am but a
eager disciple of winter,
of greens turnt to whites,
of grey migrating geese.

Though first I am nothing more
than a dream of a dandelion seed,
which is to say not lost,
but wandering without aim.