torture-, my dear,
is what I live inside of
everyday.

To know
what it is I feel...
and to also know that I
can do nothing
about it,
nothing to stop it,
nothing to burn it out.

It consumes.

"They" say passion consumes
the Soul like flame to a candle's
wax.

How many souls do I own?

It has been ages
and ages
that I have loved you,
small aeons that look like
magic fireworks when viewed from
afar-
stars bursting or imploding
all manner of greens and reds
blues and yellows-
my God!

I will give you colors.


The waiting is the worst.
Counted time.
Counted exercises and tasks.

It is not a countdown.

"It is not a countdown."

No.
But it is waiting.
Not for him.
No.
For me.

For the things I still need to learn
before him.
For the changes that loom on the horizon.
For the moment
no,
THAT moment
maybe I'll be driving a car,
maybe I'll be lying in my bed, drifting off to sleep,
maybe I'll be mid-sentence in a conversation with a friend,
I don't know.

But I know the moment.
I know how it feels.

It is Archimedes and his fat legs,
overflowing the bathtub,
flooding the bathroom carpets,
Eureka
EUREKA
I have found it!

I remember my last and only
"Eureka!"
and the thing that I had found
was my own, stuttering heart,
beating hard and fast
for you.

Torture is knowing
your happiness
is always
just
out

of



reach

It has been
a long time
since I felt
this scared
of everything.

When I pull out my phone
and hit the button that
makes it light up,
and I see

that you haven't called,
you haven't texted,
you haven't socialed
my media,

I say the current time
either aloud or in my head
and I continue on with
my stuff.

I never even think about why
I have looked at my phone
and told myself the time
anyway.

Except-
tonight when I read 10:54,
-inner monologue style-
it hit me,
Wall of bricks style.

I just keep waiting for you.

When all of this is said and done
I still won't regret all of the time
I spent loving you.

Delirious with exhaustion,
both mental and physical,
the young woman dropped herself,
hard and fast, with a mix of
hopelessness and frustration which caught the nursing mother three seats to her left off guard.
The new mom shifted herself so that her back was to the young woman.

The young woman sat motionless for many minutes, staring out at the planes.
I was curious. I was two seats to her right.

I asked,
"Rough flight?" like the dweeb I am.
She turned and looked at me.
Eyes washed red with lack of sleep still burned icy blue as they sized me up.
She smiled almost.
Then she got up and walked away.

I will never know her.

cinder block museum trapped skirt monlogue, caught underneath layer after layer of sediment and time, beholding nothing else save itself, the abyss, Nanu, free range closer, unargumentative and sweet.
Golden dapple sunlight
red apples scattered like fat rubies
on the front lawn.
Summer dawn sleeping. A campfire waiting to be lit. Sudden fractured lights and cool breezes. Ripples across a pond, as birds rise up and across. Worship. Song. Music to heavens, for the heavens, from the heavens, circlet complete.
Radium halos.
A brown sphere rotating in space. Celestial stairway wooden door.

Rains falls hard against the sheets of woven tile roofs,
torrenting down off their sides and flooding
the narrows in between the houses.
Two new lovers splash up a good deal
of water,
running gaily into and out of sight,
a shrill shriek of excitement and a deep laugh still echoing against the gray-blue bricks, lit gold-green in places by hanging lamps on wires,
higher up, above the thin, many windowed walls.
White purple flash. Crack of lightning.
Thunder rattles the sobbing windowpane.
A baby upstairs cries out and is soon soothed.
I think only of dinner and of you.
I will eat bulb-onion soup, with freshly picked mint.
And I will consume you,
raw.