Please no- not another love poem,
Not another repetitious unravelling of sentiment and revelation that
Yes-! You feel and you desire and you want
Just as much
As almost everyone else.

Not another love poem,
No more please,
I can't stand looking at them
And feeling this heart inside me
Grow hard and heavy, become a mountain
Of missing you,
Until I want to scream,
Until I want to
Wake up from this crazy thing.

And everyone else in the world just gets to
Keep writing love poems,
and why are you in every single one?

I love nights like tonight
When the wind catches me
And pushes my hair back
And it's as if I've been standing in a thick, deep, dark forest
And now the trees and bushes and hanging vines blow back in different directions
Revealing paths I could not see before
Letting me choose again
Which way to walk,
Instead of this lonely frustrated hobble through thickets
I get a chance to pick
My own path,
And the wind will keep blowing me forward
To a new forest
With different animals and sounds
To learn and fear.

But God,
I love nights like this,
When the whole world is made new again
By nothing more
Than a breeze and a searching heart

I see a monster
It is eating spaghetti
It is a good thing

I'm glad that it does
Not eat me or my brother
He likes spaghetti

We asked him his name
And he grumbled intensely,
"I'm Mr. Monster!"

He always came in
After a quarter past ten
And raided our fridge.

Frederiksburgville Town
Didn't usually have monsters
But they had pasta

And so the monster
Told the little children things
About from where it came

And it sang a song
That was very short and long
And it went like this:

Gobbledegook gobbledeedee
Fricasha bulungo tirimasu wings!

The children sat stunned
It was a horrible song
You can't sing along.

Saying hello, again
Because to say goodbye
I'd have to trust that I would not
Say hello again.

And my silence comes in colors
Like drip-dry paint on the walls of my mouth
Tastes like green and yellow today
Fresh flowers that arrived late
And the yard working all shades.

I hate to stop
Picking back up where I left off is easier said
Than remembered,
No matter how many scribbled expo marker notes are left
on the dry erase boards of my closed eyelids,

Hello,
Again.
Care to dance this dance with me?

in a house full of

                                  nothing

the camera
l
u
r
k
s
like a ******,

silently

                                                     watches

the floor weep into it's
--------------------------------------FOUNDATION----------------­----------------------------

and the knock!
                 knock!
                   knock!

coming from the                                                              ­  
                                                                                                         closet door

echos
  chos
   hos
    os

and we sit
and stare
at
heart-winning photographs;
the children we used to
be

                                                       we  silently

seep in the remembrance;

narcissus
was
   not
     in
       love
with himself

he was
  in
    love
       with
         h-h i-i s-s   s-s h-h a-a d-d o-o w-w,
the perceived


                                                        nothin­g


Just a trick
of  -   -   -   light
f
a
  l
    l
     i
      n
        g

out of books
like
l
e
  a
   v
    e
     s

of emotion,
like

F

       A

                 T

                              H

                             ­             O

                                                 ­         M

                                                     ­                      S

                                                   of suffering

                                                /  T / O / R / N /
from your
l  i  p  s

like black tar on your
s   k   i   n  

camouflage
for
the



                    A              B                 Y                      S                       S