she carried just enough hope, a little too little memory and wish, cupped in the warmth of her hands in broken hours of lavender as her stomach quivered like the mountains that grounded her to a perpetual state of being, of what she's told to call "home".
moonlight and stars, waves and oceans have all been used up in other people's heartaches.
she missed the road, missed him, missed "the platonic love of new" not like constellations and ocean ripples, but like Kerouac's typewriter misses his caress.
And like the early Hyacinths in your mother's garden, you too will bloom as this winter ends.
I remember how you'd lay out your November bones and irritably scrub away carcasses of the poetry you hated anyone reading, until you were stone-washed empty, bruised, cradling your mother's maiden name, pure, pure and pure again.
Forget the perpetual mistakes you made on midnight park benches, where the morning dew drops in your almost laconic step disturbed the way dust amiably settled upon your shadows.
You will bloom, even in the most shadowed chamber of your own heart.
My insides are empty train stations Where our kisses go to die. I have spent months rhyming Your name with bandages And bullet torn nightmares, Still smiling, still growing, Left still and surrendered I am the rain that could not fall, The night that did not turn to day, The infection, the terminal, All change, all change, all change.
I loved the way your secrets felt at night, how poetry formed between our skin as you peeled back my flaws like fine silk and red wine, I loved how alive you were within my bed sheets always asking for a million more forevers.
This is written in past tense and painfully taught me how different quiet and silent, really feel.
i) my father never taught me how to shave, so I guess that’s why a razor to him and I are two separate entities; a symbol of his pride yet a symbol of my sorrow.
ii) and it’s not my mother’s fault that I am the way I am, neither is it my own. but when my wrists twitch at the hour when I miss the way she used to smile; I blame myself.
iii) they say family is in your blood and that will never change.
iv) if so, I am related to healing wounds and the wisdom-less circles of the trunk of a mind not made for the kind of tired sleep can never cure. I am the father of my own mistakes and forever the child of a forever without a beginning.
v) not even the poetry in my arteries can save me now.
the moon wrapped itself around your face, as if like a mask, protecting you from the monsters, hiding something that I still don't know, as street lights dissolved, silently, oh so quietly, into the night sky, contesting and wishing to become the stars held together with moments like this and that and who and where: I'm still not there.