i.
Mango was terrified of getting to know people. Her vivacious personality would never give this away, but talking to a stranger or an acquaintance? Hell, that’s easy. Nobody knows your shortcomings, your failures…your past. Basically you can be whomever you want to be for a while, that amazing, intriguing woman from afar, as long as you don’t let anyone touch you. Married men in particular liked to call her name, their wives had the whole reality thing going on, while she reminded them of a time when they still had choices.

ii.
He used to love Lizi’s strong emphasis on home and structure, but now it seemed so meaningless. If he couldn’t talk to her, if he couldn’t make love to her, if they didn’t laugh anymore, she may as well have been his mom. Lizi had said they felt like roommates when they got into fights about ***, which was fairly often. But she didn’t create the arousal that he was looking for. She was pretty and smart, **** smart truthfully, but she treated him like an inferior. He didn’t want to share his ideas or accomplishments because she nearly always shot them down and picked them apart. He wasn’t even going to try to tell her about his religious or philosophical observations, or expect her to understand why the sound or lyrics of a song made him cry.

iii.
Mango did not like to talk about her past.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged “maybe I was in a time warp. You probably shouldn’t put me in your mouth, you don’t know where I’ve been.”
“I’m going to ignore the fact that what you just said was ****.”
He stopped for a second to recapture his train of thought.
She put her feet on the dashboard and grinned.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I will figure it out somehow.”
“Good. That guarantees me that you’ll stick around for a while, or at least until the mystery is solved.”
“Oh, I have a feeling that as soon as I solve one mystery, you’ll give me another.”

iv.
“You aren’t afraid of the truth and you aren’t afraid of yourself.  And those are the very fears that have
gotten me where I am.”
“Which is?”
“Doing a job I hate. Living with a woman I don’t love. Still trying to please my parents.” He looked away from her for a moment, “Afraid to let you love me.”
“Why does my love scare you?”
Jimi looked up and found eye contact again, “Because I might find out that I’m not really dead, and
I might find out who I really am.”
Mango moved in very close, putting her hands on either side of his face. She smiled and the intensity made her eyes appear black, like portals into another realm.  
“And why would that be a bad thing?”

v.
Was he just the cliché guy who needed the mystery or the forbidden?
No, he had to give himself more credit than that.
It had more to do with being with a living human being who allowed you to feel alive too.

i listened to the clever
words that you sang
watched you close your eyes
and strum your guitars
forgetting myself,
charmingly moved by
your poetry and cadence
yet the pervasive,
recurring thought
was how impelled i felt
to welcome our bodies
fervid collision
bury my hands in your hair
firmly seize your jaw
graze your  lips  
and kiss you.

Blindly letting "us" oppress my spirit
I have put my happiness
under your directives

But the sky has tapped me on the
shoulder saying "come with us,
this is where you belong"

Aura expanding, lithe and flowing
sweet gifts of elements,
divine exhales of summer

Grounded, reaching, floating upwards,
songs of widened pathways;
portals of endless blues

And I stroll through this world with
freedom eyes, and I think and feel
as one unencumbered  

If you want to find me, you must
let yourself soar, because I suddenly
remembered I can let myself out.

the first time we passed in the hallway
our energies awakened
to the presence of a like spirit
it was that instant that you
became my friend
although neither of us knew it yet
a year later, mouths and hearts opened
empathy
spirituality
humanness
and humor
linguistic nuances and predilections
sing with ease and asylum
the enlightenment and
liberation of being heard!
for this, i vow my loyalty
years, miles, and actions
are inconsequential
here i stand
confidante
encourager
synchronicity
how much you have been
to me is fathomless
the who you are, is soil under my feet
your words breathe air into my mouth
your kindness anoints my head with oil

Today, like so many other days
my ipod shuffles (luna)
and lands on
a picture of you and me
your hand alongside my face
your eyes holding a depth
indescribable
having the kind of love
even tears cannot show.
And later, dashing about
my computer you are
there
like a surprise visitor who
suddenly entered the room
part angel, part ghost
and I catch my breath
my stomach and heart fight
for my throat.
Love so broken and neither
of us know how to fix it.
Both of us still  
feel our Pisces
tails tied together
still dream of how it
should
have been.
(3-7, 7lbs, 14 oz, blue eyed me,
brown eyed you)
Your beauty paralyzes me.
I think I will cry over you for
the rest of my life.

ever sit alongside someone you love
whose face is gaunt and body
is emaciated because her organs
are eating her own flesh
until there is nothing left to
draw upon and her
heart will stop
her lungs will cease
and she smiles at you
and says
my kids are going to miss me
do you still wear a size two?
are you seeing anyone?
you seem happy, i am glad
and you hold her hand
and take a picture
because any minute
she could be gone
and you keep crying
but you have work to do
and old people die everyday
but she is something special
to you
we are soul sisters
i tell her
and she agrees

I feel like you sometimes
as I flit about from day to day
cautiously touching ground
in search of a safe place to land
In search of the kind people
whose motives are gentle
and whose words can be trusted
“Come closer, I won’t hurt you”
Some of the most frightening
words in the English language
And the naive ones who
still believe in love
get run over
or batted about by a hungry cat
and left to decompose throughout
the remaining weeks of summer

i.
He stared at the woman, eyes darting to memorize her angles and features,  
at any moment this mirage could disappear.
For two full minutes he was unable to speak, too scared to let words loose;
they can no longer be hidden once they’ve been exposed.
So he kissed her instead, because he liked how it felt to no longer feel alone.

ii.
The grip of loneliness refused to let her go, like the claws of a jealous lover.
“One thing for certain, there is no god. We are completely alone, love is *******.”
“What if I showed you that you are not alone, how would it change your life?”
“I think I might actually be happy.”
“You are happy when you let yourself be…there is this…fire inside of you,  but
every time the momentum starts to build you tell yourself whatever you need to
hear to keep it from taking you.”

iii.
“Why the hell are you starting this with me? This isn’t right.”
“Who says I’m starting anything?”
“Oh, you’re one of ‘those’ guys.”
“What are ‘those’ guys?”
“The type of guy who pretends that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and
doesn’t admit to what he’s doing so he can play innocent when he’s called to
the carpet. But in reality,  he knows exactly what he is doing, and most of it
is premeditated.”
“Like ******?”
“Yeah, something like that. There is a good chance something or someone
could die in this scenario.”

iv.
They laid still for a while, trying to catch their breath.
“I think your parents named you after the wrong Craig Finn character.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“They should have called you Hallelujah, because you sound like an angel
when you ***.”
She smiled and she kissed him and they made love again,
and she felt like an angel.

v.
He started out the door and turned, lifting his shy head to look at her
“As far as I’m concerned, you are the only one I’ve ever slept with.”
She stopped breathing, afraid to believe the nouns and verbs that were floating.  
She repeated the sentence out loud after he walked away.
They were the most loving, pure and perfect words she had ever heard.

In this world we come in contact with many people
But there are some
                                    With the artistry of language

There is a kind of humor that only a wordsmith articulates
A kind of intimacy that only a metaphor can tell

A type of eroticism that the presence of its descriptors  

                                    Elicit transcendent flames

And the absence of its poetry leaves it ordinary

And there is something about those people who live instinctively
Knowing that their choice of words can

Capture an experience
Encompass an emotion
                                     Bring it to life and let it fascinate

And those people are my starlight
My still night and moon

Those people are my sunlight
My energy and ocean

They breathe me
Feed me

Surge through me
And identify me
                                      And I am drawn to them

By something bigger than myself, inevitably, we see into one another
Understanding the life within the bonding

                                      Is wordless
But would not exist otherwise.

That serpent fear
has slithered into
my stomach
and is coiled there
a dark, solid weight
secreting his poisons
digesting my soul
I swallow hard
to push him back
down
my throat where
he climbs and lunges
to remind me
he is still there

Make love to my whole self
Each molecule that makes me alive
Make love to my laughter
As your lips graze my stomach
Make love to my hurting places
Tenderly licking my wounds
Make love to my compassion
Hands gliding in discovery
Make love to my ideas and dreams
My body in surrender to you
And just as you have entered me
I have slipped inside of you
Passing through the blackness
in your eyes
Notice this
Feel me there
Don't let it cause you fear
Intimacy will heal us
And we won't be left the same

i have too much
to offer this world
to be
an angry man's
trophy

The cacophony of voices pushing and
shoving, everyone seemed to be taller

than I was and they all seemed to know
what to do. The teacher showed impatience

with my tiny body, frozen in fear by the
giant circular stone apparatus where

twenty children washed their hands. It was
clear that she liked the kids whose last

names were Johnson and whose parents
owned farms on Highway 15. They all went

to the Methodist Church in Town. I wished
I was blonde with a raspy voice like Doreen.

I showed my plaid cotton tennis shoes and
sang “Old **** Tucker” while dancing my

best country jig for show-and-tell. This was
when I learned that it was “Dan Tucker”

and that “****” was a bad word. My daddy
said ****, and he wore work boots with

stiff golden laces that crisscrossed onto
metal fasteners twelve inches up his calves.

The boots kept time when he played guitar;
his eyes and lips smiling and laughing over

some absurd thought he had the temerity
to speak out loud. Daddy was the most

interesting person I knew. He quit school
after 8th grade, but understood humanity

more than most. He wore cowboy boots
when he played the fiddle, and if he said

****, then it must be okay. I still felt good
about singing my song and proud of myself

for having mustered up the courage. I did
not have fancy toys or artifacts from family

vacations like the other kids. I had never
heard kids call each other names before

I made the acquaintance of the school
playground. It was strange how they

ganged up on the boy they said was hyper
and had ***** eyes. I did not know what

either of those things meant, but I knew it
made him sad and made me afraid to talk

to him. They said I looked like a ghost, I
did not know if that was good or bad.

Doreen was not afraid of the ball, and that
made her okay. My Mom decided to pick a

friend for me, but I did not like Linda. She
did not know how to play with dolls; she

did not make up stories about their lives
or pretend to be their mommy, she just

looked at them. Linda was tedious. The
boy with ***** eyes made more sense

to me. He lived in the yellow house that
had a dog who would bite and scare

the nice people away. I finally talked to
him in 6th grade on the hour long bus rides

home. Once, an older boy named John
snapped a rubber band on his eye over

and over until it swelled completely shut,
my friend just sat and took it until the

bus driver intervened. John’s older brother
played with guns, and John was scared of

him, and older brother was scared of father.
We hated when the brothers rode the bus.

I decided that most boys were mean and
that to be a boy must be terrifying. One

year, ***** eyes almost drowned during
gym class, the other kids said he tried to

**** himself. They thought it was funny.
Girls will never know the horrors of the

8th grade boy’s locker room. When he
was 15 he crossed in front of a semi on

his moped, they found his foot half a mile
away from his body.  I wonder if the kids

thought that was funny too. I was too
afraid of my emotions to go to the funeral.

Ghost to ***** Eyes: I am sorry that they
hurt you Vincent, and sorry that I am

scared to see your innocence reduced
to road **** in a coffin.

I dated a man once who seemed to sit on the outside of his
relationships and watch the plot unfold, adding a few dramatic

flourishes and keepsakes for effect. I found his tales of parting
gifts to former lovers odd, I had the impression he needed Act

II to be over so that he could write the ending and begin a
new play. One girl got his guitar, another, a coveted book of

poetry signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Their stories lived-on
inside a shoe box on the top shelf of his closet, and some

entries in a leather bound journal held shut by a leather strap.
He had written some nice things inside of it about me, but

hearing how great I am as we part ways has gotten repetitive
in my own story line. The question begs, do I subconsciously

wish for my own shoe box and leather bound journal of good
byes and thank you for stopping by, the ******* were lovely?

No, to be fair to me I don’t. I know one thing though, I would
want an original copy of Leaves of Grass, that is, if I wanted a

parting gift. I told him to let goodbye be enough when it ended
and that I needed to be more than one of his shoe box girls. He

was startled and a little embarrassed. I am still attempting to
decipher how my saying it needed to end made me feel like I

had just gotten dumped. Other times, I have unwittingly used
my own power of persuasion to shake a love struck boy into

the possible reality that I am not as magical as he thinks I am.
But I really wish he would refute me, in spite of my convincing

argument. I still hope for the “you are the most fascinating
woman alive and I cannot live without you” prize. I poked

holes for air in the lid of the shoe box to keep that hope alive.

A wet, salty tear rolls down
Emotions climb out of their grave
Explosion of light inside
Spread and seep from my lips
Powerless to contain them
Gasping as they emerge
Given utterance, validation and freedom
"I am still in love with you."
Another wet, salty tear

Friday night used to be for writing.
Red wine, music and poetry
Is how I survived this era of
aloneness.
An era of destitution
that rediscovered the writer
inside
with a critical edition of
Leaves of Grass
and a leather bound journal
with pages too pretty to write
upon.
Some blogs lauded by perfect strangers
who found my erotica and loneliness
intriguing.
Kierkegaard says poets are unhappy
but
Mr. Whitman seems pretty **** happy
pushing his man-flesh into his lovers.
Sometimes I would use what little
grocery money I had on that
$10 bottle of wine.
It calmed me and felt like the mark
of a true artist
to be a Friday night alcoholic.

A little girl barely fitting behind
the metal casing of the basement furnace
The wall feels cold through her t-shirt
and scratches the skin on her back
No one knows about her hiding place
Except the spiders that occasionally crawl
across her bare legs and feet
It’s dark. She tries not notice that it’s scary
Because it is quiet and it’s safe
There is nothing to stop her from existing
in the world she creates in her mind
That world has sunshine and loving words
Where she is pretty, like the girls in the catalogues
with dresses and ruffled underwear
Jesus carries her on his shoulders and tells her that she is special
So for an hour or two she is not un-bathed and unwanted
She will sit here dreaming until she falls asleep
Because no one will notice that she is gone

I found a poem that reminded me of you
I was going to leave it on your door
Because you said you did not want visitors yesterday
Well, I was dying yesterday! Holy Christ!
I hold my stomach as I laugh
He listens intently as I read it out loud
A flush in his cheeks betray his emotion
Thank you, I take that as a compliment
Who is this Charles Bukowski?
A knock on the door
Why are you here? I was expecting the governor!
It is the hospice worker
Oh Perry, I love you and bend down to hug him
His shoulders feel sharply bony now
I love you too darling in playful tones
I might just go to that Happy Hour today
I think that would be splendid
I say to a dying man

Spare me the rhetoric
Your transparent lines
Trying to get me
into your bed
Can’t decide between playing
a hipster or a
corporate American
Your new tennis shoes remind me
of the first day of school
I was just looking for a cup of coffee
Honey
Better luck tonight when you hit the clubs

The aura of your spirit precedes you
Calling out insight and energy
It swirls around you, hanging above
Like a singular beam of light
And you tread on instinct;
seeing with your eyes closed
Universe amalgamated;
a conduit for its voice
And you tell the tales of your old soul
And you tell the tales of your purpose and journey
But a broken hearted boy haunts you
The one who ran away and no one cared
So you tear at your feelings
as they hold you under
Gasping for air in the oxygen of escape
But it wears off
It always wears off
And you forget how exquisitely you are made
But one day, you will make peace with the boy
And suture the bleeding holes in your heart
And the footsteps of this nomad will climb
to see how much bigger your world can become
and that some dreams are built very far from our homes
Because at this moment, living inside of you
is the energy that makes a good night a good night

Four years of hopes flung into the sky like clay discs
of a ***** shoot and foolishly, I think
that they are real pigeons with wings colored
in iridescent shades and cooing softly to me

“I am coming home.”

I do silly things, like clean my house, buy new
******* and his favorite foods. I push all other
men away and wait, so I won’t risk rejection or
inflict wounds by betraying this man who

does not even belong to me.

As the date approaches, the estimated time
of arrival becomes more and more obscure
like the day he left for California and never
came back. And the innumerable

broken promises every day thereafter.

“I won’t be here a year” he says. But year two
hides him safely in west coast crevasses. “No I
won’t come to see you” declares year three
“they confiscated my electronics,

I am not supposed to talk to you.

I beat myself in the head with a golf club, don’t
you see how much I love you? I am coming back
for you in year four; why didn’t you wait for me?
In rushing water I stripped naked  

37.83 N, 122.54 W and carved a poem

about us into a rock but I needed to prove that
I am normal, so I loved and ****** the autumn
haired girl. Why won’t you talk to me? How
could you hurt me this way? My song set

tells the story of you

but I cannot let you hear it because you have
abandoned me.” One by one, the hopes are
shot down, “pull!” cries his fears and erratic
behavior, because I broke his silent contracts

by moving on with my life.

How many times will I scold myself saying
that I never should have answered the phone?  
If your muse is tragedy, you must continually
feed it. Now is it he or I with the spoon in hand?

Mounded spoonfuls of clay pigeons.

Phone kept close
Watching the clock
Maybe somebody better
will interrupt
Darting eyes
Incomplete thoughts
Words bounce and ricochet
off the side of your head
Mix your messages
Feed your ego
Pretend not to notice
my wilting enthusiasm
Don’t text me when
the next girl threatens you
with conversation

I could cry making love to her, said he about me. He took me
through the countryside where he endured and at times, enjoyed
life as a child, met his father; surprisingly winsome and caring.

Showed me the clearing where dreams of wedding vows reside,
wildflowers and sunlight and the smell of the wind. Said he could
not wait to kiss me inside the threshold of his new house, could

not wait to make love to me on the new bed that he bought to
contain the exclusive bonds of our two bodies. He said time and
constancy would prove his devotion

I am here.
I am not going anywhere, said he to me.

I scanned my instincts and found incredulous peace, my own disbelief
was the only recognizable fear, and a reason NOT to be happy would
need to be birthed by ignorant spontaneous invention. I felt beautiful,

loved and secure, with laughter and poetry, singing and guitar,
tranquility and passion and rain on our first kiss, cooing Hey Jupiter.

Undone. My head is throbbing from smashing against the proverbial
windshield because he slammed on the brakes and slipped every
thing about me into reverse tragedy has taken his mother away and

sisters and brother look to the eldest for help his 3 year old daughter
has just returned from Maine.

Too- much- at- once, he gasped, I am drowning! Take my hand
love, you are not alone, I will sit beside you, I won’t say a word.

But he wanted nothing of me from me or for me because my sea
colored towels recently hung in his bathroom have been speaking
auditory hallucinations “She has come to steal your autonomy” and

he felt shame for this, after all it was he who asked me to put my
toothbrush in his cabinet. No need to over-complicate; he thought
he wanted a relationship, until he remembered all the things he

can’t stand about relationships and now my form represents all
the things that [and] he cannot stand, and the face in the mirror
said to him “Don’t listen to the towels, you coward! You are afraid

of letting her down. Just let her down now, get it over with and
then you can pretend that she never happened.”
He listened to the mirror and to the towels and declared,

I am here.
I am not going anywhere.

Thus, he got rid of those ******* towels and the woman who
brought them into his house. Life is too hard to include you, said
he to me, just accept it; this has nothing to do with you.

Hey Jupiter, nothing’s been the same.