We are beautiful contradictions.
Living, while dying,
and rarely satisfied with either.

They closed our eyes,
with the fluorescent lights looking on,
and helping to stuff things into the cracks of our minds.
Filling up the spaces,
where imagination used to dwell,
in quiet villages of thought, all colors and shapes,
we hadn't thought of yet.
There were no more rolling hills and streams of ideas,
only strait backed rows of facts,
that expanded day by day,
stabbing the mind with iron fence posts,
pounded in by the hammer,
of crowded words on glossy pages.
Imagination shattered, and faded,
with each stroke.
They told us they opened our eyes,
but they closed them,
as tightly as their own.

From so far away
the fairground music fades
the carney's call echoes.
Were you sure you wanted to pay those pennies
for that stick of horehound candy?
String a song of sixpences together
And **** at them until they turn your mouth blood red
To hide your broken lips.

In the double wide that gapes into the evening
With its yawning broken windows.
The dingy feeling in your eyes
Refuses to fade with the dust
And the touch of sticky plastic stars on your bedroom ceiling
Keeps you company
In the bitter watches of the night

Jesus and John watch your father from the living room wall,
As the last flickers of a camel’s Pentecost flame
Are extinguished on your arm.  
Branded, you lie stained in sin
Your child eyes asking St. Peter
Why the gate is shut.
He breaks bread across the table
With your bones crushed to a fine flour,
Mixed with wine.
This is my body.
This is my blood.

The red scarf looks best on me.
It's the first time I've gone somewhere alone
here, in months.
It's growing bitterly cold,
I understand why the wind
might hate the human race,
having blown us about for the past million odd years
and finding that we rarely end up in the right direction.
He tugs at my hair, and the clouds
as I troop down the sidewalk,
the cat who walked by herself
I think.
Something like an independent streak
that rarely rears its head.
Might as well make the most of it
while I have the courage.

When a star burns black,
But no one is around to hear it,
it screams the last, lingering, piercing note,
of a symphony
written for a dying wish,
and a lost dream.

Finally imploding into silence
where even the brightest of lights,
is lost in hollow darkness.

My eyes feel heavy enough
to fall shut
and never open,
eyelids clanging like a tin box lid
with cheap hinges.

My hands feel heavy enough
to fall down
to permanent attention
and never rise,
frozen like the tin soldier
who was lost in the ashes.

My feet feel heavy enough
to fall once more
and never lift again,
bolted, like a tin sign
to a rotting telephone pole.

I apologize that this is not a poem.
but a simple thanks,
to all my followers and fans
for creating such a lovely community here.
Thank you for your encouragement,
your compliments, your critiques, your concern,
and sharing your own work here, too.
Somehow,
it feels better, safer to share things with you all,
Nearly-complete strangers,
than with even my mother.
However your life goes on,
beyond the screen, between the words,
I hope it goes well.
Thank you.

Your broad forehead glistening--
kissed with salt from the sweat
of the sea you've never seen.
The clay is still under your nails
from molding the beaker beside you.
Meadowsweet on your lips
you lay down to die
with the softness illness brings.
Tonderghie copper hair
falls over your knees,
body curled as a new babe's.
Carry with you our songs to the afterlife
from this cold forest
to clearest skies.

The cursed queen, to be sure.
Lonely you stand in your tower,
thickened waist and wrinkled cheeks.
There is no one but God here, now.
The men you loved are dead- one in body,
the other in spirit,
but still making love to another
on your broken marriage bed.
Your mother gone, and with her your children,
though their tiny things
still rest in the cupboard, their tiny hands still clutch your heart.
Your sister is mad, keening still
over the moulding coffin of her long-dead king.
Your one salvation, your living daughter,
small and kind with her parents red hair,
is shunned and rebuked as you are,
though you send her kisses on the wind.
Still you stand, refusing to fall to your knees
you have taken the armor of God
as you once took the armor of man.
Though under that armor
your heart is breaking.

And I wish that I could write
of pleasant things, of smiles and summer days,
But they would be dull, lifeless words,
that lie limp on the page,
like dusty plastic flowers.
My soul finds beauty in the palms of sorrow,
amid the lines of worry and heartache,
such beauty, that it can, and will,
describe it forever.

I shiver,
in the cold of yet another winter day.
It matches my mood, sullen and grey
But with the general good weather front
I put on as I go out the door.

Cloaked in false sunshine,
I cast my empty rays
To anything and everyone
They expect warmth,
But feel only the icy breeze
Which has already frozen me.

Something is drilling between my ribs.
Freedom swings to guilt.
*justify, justify, justify

The scrape of thought--
like the scrape of skin
on the bare threads of a sheetless mattress.
Limbs, like the first lines of a journal,
******, new,
waiting for the scars and the stories that follow
as bodies move together,
so slowly as to atrophy.
Memories echo in the silence
light careening through the window,
and words we can't remember teasing our tongues.
I could have asked you so much, and so little.
These are the stories we tell our inner selves,
the half-truths we justify
and the lies we ignore.
The moments we relive until they are frayed
beyond memory,
beyond repair,
the quiet brush of hands
over a tattered blanket.

My Soul has fallen in love with Sorrow
they make love and call it poetry.
My Spirit thinks he has overstayed his welcome.

Tuesday: a squalling jolt of surprise sorrow
And I am holding a flood behind my lips
Mouth pressed to the leak,
While the sadness glides through me like a body under ice
Faceless, unnamed specter
Caressed in the current’s deadly beauty
While I stand voiceless, holding this sudden sorrow
Like a half-rotted memory.
Who is it for?
What tattered thread snapped
left a frayed chalk line
At the back of my neck.
Morbidly, I wonder if one of the men I’ve loved is dead
If this stranger grief
Is the last sinew of intimacy
torn asunder.

The cliff’s monumental resolve
Plucks the sustained note of its rise
over the wayward valley,
Sound thick and heavy enough to chew,
A nameless taste of memory
calls to mind
Seven years ago
When a woman who shared my name
Threw herself from the cliff,
Into the snapped arms of trees below,
The act of falling, monumental resolve
The upward sweep of dark hair
Against the grey hand of the rock.

After,
my mother’s phone rang
with urgent voices
repeating my name as they’d heard it
On the evening news
Asking if it was me who had climbed
the bones of the mountain,
I who had stared down into the doldrum of trees,
watched them float in the captive air,
I who had murmured into the reticent sky
And still found no answer
That whispered “stay.”
I, who had scraped the soft skin of my foot across sandstone
With the last grounding pull
And still stepped into nothing.

And when she said I had not
That the name, though mine, was not mine,
I heard the relief in the notes of their voices
Collapsing into soft reprieve.

But I knew what it was
To wonder if the plummet was
like the upward flutter of coat in a draft or
The cold sweep of wind across a wet finger or
the warm, couching blast of a passing subway car.

And they don’t report on suicides for this reason
But everyone hoped it was an accident
Because accidents can be explained away
As the things that pluck us up and drop us into death,
But walking into death
With open eyes always led to too many questions.

Someday, she and I--
our name will be said for the last time
Edging on the ledge of wrinkled lips
Staring into the ground below—
And the syllables will hold themselves over the edge of the world
And jump.

Love me, he said.
She tried
And failed

stand quietly here, love
yes, next to me.
Enough to feel the air pass between us,
between breaths,
as the wind gasps.
do you hear them, dear?
those voices the Echoes bring to us?
Ghastly, aren't they.
******, dark voices,
wrought and rent like the chests they came from.
Look at them, darling.
watch their feet melt into red earth.
their hands, too, fraught with iron.
Faces, see their faces?
There is your father, your husband, your brother, your son, dear.
Your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother.
See their hollow mouths agape?
Hear their voices screaming?
That's what pain sounds like.
Your heart is making the same noise, isn't it?
I can hear it.
This is hell, love.
Just another part of life,
and death, I suppose.
It's all a circle anyway.
This is where we learned
to spell hell with three letters.
Remember that, dear,
remember that.

Maybe
Love is nothing
but a rib spreader.

The beautiful spirit of life
lives in the spaces between people,
between the interlaced fingers,
of two children
who stroll down the sidewalk together.

The dark sour-mash smell of leather
hovers in the sweat-stained heat
As the truck snarls, awakened
its tires in their Sisyphean tread
find the familiar road around the lake
The rounding concentric lines of regret
I trace like an addled palmist.
When you spend so much time lost
you find comfort in the surety of banal paths.
I am an adult
But I never left the womb of this town,
wrinkled offspring of a tired mother
Who carries me in a low-slung belly
Drying and stretching in endless vessel.
She knows I tried to leave her once
Across the world
In another womb, green and fecund and full of death
and like the lukewarm believer I am,
I was spat out
crawled back to her.
She swallows me back up
Like the drowning boy in the lake
***** in water.
If only the weight in my mouth
Could float in water, like the styrofoam buoys
Could float to the top, in a dead man’s float
but it’s all too well-moored, concrete and clay.
I am silent
I am silent
Cruel mother,
You know I will never
Have the courage
To leave.

What I said, I meant.
Always means never ever forgotten.
I will forever bear the brand
of two hearts bruised.
Mine included.
Let me take the blow I give,
I caused the pain, let me suffer it gladly.
If I were to break a heart
pray let it be mine.

I feel so lost without you,
my north star,
my comfort at the end of days.
There may as well be light years between us
and that destroys me.

You're golden in the light of grief
romanticized, I know,
but right now,
don't care.

Signposts

The signposts at the end of her life
Swam in watery fades
I don’t know if she had time
To forget how to read
But there were no books in her room
Just the echoing call of an uncertain bird
As we pointed the feathers out to her through the dusty blinds.
And later
When she was gone
I could not cry—
everything I knew of her
slipped beneath a frozen surface
Running like the sound of water
In underground caves
Unburst and unfelt.
I asked for a blood letting,
For him to stay with me
While I found something sorrowful enough
To bring the memories to the vein’s surface
And he held me while I sobbed
At a mother feeding her starving daughter
Trying to save her from herself.
I do not know
If my grief stays buried so deep
To keep the surface waters calm
Or if it had dried, and isn’t there at all
And I am digging a well
For an imagined thirst.

I learned to find beauty in everything, even the sorrow— a curse?
It is the deadly beauty of darkness
before the lion closes his mouth
round your head,
and the vast blues of water
as you drown.
Romantic? Never.
Real? Always.
The truth was beautiful
and it hurt.

But in the end
You were everything I needed
To find myself
Again.

I was going to write a poem
asking parents
To raise their daughters not to be soft
To warn that their honey covered lips
Draw flies.
That the sweetness we have had
Shoved down our throats
Is choking us
When we want to scream for help.

But it is not your daughter’s fault.
Parents, do not raise your sons to believe
They are owed answers.
The honey on a girl’s lips
Was never theirs to taste.
Her body
Is not a trap, not a vice
It Is her space in the world, autonomous.
Only animals see traps.
She exists for no one but herself.
Sons, if she crosses your path
Leave
Her
Alone.

I was going to write a poem about you,
but I can't.
There's too much to say,
and besides,
I can't think of anything that compares to you.

Beneath a banshee cloak fog
The dying year shifts in her harrowed sleep
tussock hair splayed across December
The ancient ash of her bones
particulate jewels
against the lingering eye of the sallow moon.
The languid turn of the world
Moves with her
the last song of solstice
Hummed a breath above a murmur.
In her brittle, oaken fingers
The last quiver of hope waits
for the ****** year’s spark.

Our epilogue is a grey sky
beneath it are the small plants I care for and bring to bloom
lavender, vervain, rosemary--especially
that anchor me to your memory.

You knew it meant remembrance
How the lathe of time reshapes, shaves
mud from my eyes
on the small abrasive moments
the little thrip-like wounds we never meant to inflict
and how they siphoned the spirit from us.

In the throes of want
I was hungry for more than arms--
there were times I could almost taste your soul
but even on the doorstep
when I caught the key from around your neck
it would never fit into the rusted lock,
despite all your honeyed words.

I have known men with varicolored souls
with wounded souls
with starving souls,
yours-- silver, mausoleum still
a ****** eating snow
to hide any sign of life.

Loving you, coaxing a stag to drink
holding water in my hands until
it seeped from my fingers into the earth, undrunk--
At my feet grew anemone and yew
living things
that do not have a soul
that want only what I can give
and never
promise
more.

He feels the ache
Mostly on Wednesdays
The limp emptiness, gaping
Like the sleeves of the forgotten jacket in the back of his closet.
The scent of his cologne is gone now
But in the morning, dressing,
He still thumbs the supple shell of the leather—
He hasn’t looked
But he is sure
He has worn a light spot into the left sleeve.
How many uptown nights
Under the harsh lights of the metro car
Did he reach for his arm
the taught muscle under the sleeve like warm stone
Feel the stitches over the pad of his thumb,
Before he placed a hand on his.

On Wednesdays,
He treats himself to takeout
From the corner store,
The creamy peanut sauce on bedraggled vegetables
Is enough to drown out the hunger
But between the bites of rice and curry
He still craves the
homemade broccoli cheddar soup and fresh bread,
Humming echoing in the kitchen in time to the rhythm of the chopping knife
A peck on the cheek
And the brush of his hands passing him the steaming bowl, warm and dry from washing.
His stomach growls.

He doesn’t smoke anymore
But he lapses
Mostly on Wednesdays
When the love-sick moon is visible
Between the high rises
A night like the one he left
Biting winter, the way icy concrete pierces bare feet
He sits in the open window sill,
Smoke flows into the dark like memory
the smell of nicotine
stirring relief and regret
It all feels
the same.

The moon is too high for earthly alto
Below her silver parenthesis  
The pause of a half-note North Star
North and north,
What direction is up?
There is so much beyond our crude compass crosses
We are fond of our straight lines
When the world is round, round
Round as clasped hands, a red mouth
Overflowing with sound that runs down the chin like blood
Round as a helix cupped by fingers, by lips, by teeth,
Round as a dancers hips, circling their core as slow and sweet as the turn of Earth in gravity’s arms
Harm is angles,
The blade of a broken plough
A razor deconstructed
Lines drawn in sand by silver spurs.
When we have carved the trenches
When we have shoved the soft, stardust beings of us
Into corners, into cells,
When concrete replaces clay under our feet
And we have forgotten the feel of mud between our toes.
What have we
after this?
When we have forgotten
The rounding beat
Of our own heart.

TW: Suicide
*if you or someone you know is considering suicide, please call the National Suicide Hotline:
800-273-8255



My father walked in
Thinking his son was still in love with his life
But the letter
the letter
the letter
The pills
the pills
the pills
Scattered
Like the candy left from the Christmas parade
Da, how do I tell you
It was never because I didn’t love you
I do,
I do,
I do.
How do I tell you
Home is an echo, a smoke filled hazelwood  
Where I cannot put out the flames.
How do I tell you
The day we went Christmas shopping in the city
I cried in front of the window display
Because the cotton snow looked so cold
And it reminded me
Of when I was 6, and you set me on your shoulders
And we went out into the copse
To cut juniper boughs for the table
And came in smelling of wet snow and sweat and the soft, sweet pepper of juniper berries, hands sticky with sap
And Mum smiled,
And I cried because I knew
That was the last time I could remember I was happy
And even it was fading fast,
Flames curled around the charred edges of Mum’s lips,
Her teeth smoldered
And then she was gone into the swelling black smoke,
Curling burnt ribbons are all I have left.

How do I tell you
My fingers have razed the grey matter, amygdala,
thalamus,
cerebellum
Until they hung in charred threads
I dug a labyrinth of fire breaks in my brain
And still the Minotaurian roar of flames
Is eternal.
At night I cannot sleep, they are
So loud
So loud
So loud.
If you ever wondered
Why I am still awake at 3am
Watching late night TV in all its ****-filled glory
It is the closest I can come to numb,
And the fake family’s chatter
Is so easy
They say nothing, talk of nothing
And that is what I need
More than anything
To be nothing.

How do I tell you
It is not your fault
It is just that I am so tired,
So tired
So tired.
And the flames have burned my hands to stubs
my lungs are charred branches
That cannot expand without an exhale of ash
And I am so tired.
I have tried to climb out from under the weight
And I am dragged back in
Every time.

Da, how do I tell you
it is alright,
I have put it out
I  have put it out
It is out.
Forgive
Me.

When the world is hard
Draw your fingers through the golden oil
The balm of your last childhood summer
Burns like the satisfying sting
Of a nail pressed into mosquito bite
The tiny crosses on your flesh—
there will be so many more to bear before you are grown.
You will forget the sugar-sap sweetness of melted popsicles,
The Kool-aid kisses in their primary colors
That swim before your eyes,
The delicate snap of stray crayons under your little heel
If these were the only thorns,
The only broken promises,
How much happier
Might you have been?