flannel shirt and torn blue jeans
she always held her cards close
to her fragile heart
her wild heart

(a heart not for me)

and she fades into a cold wind
whitens into snowflakes
and wild infatuation

i'm faded

the torn page
from a list of lovers
broken and sad

my love is moonlight and mare's tails

the night's stars
shot full of lost tomorrows

I have boxes of memories
Well-marked and stored
And I am adding new ones
So that there are many more
Though life is not a rainbow
Nor is there sunshine all the way
I can still laugh and smile
And box a memory every day

In one of
my many
lifetimes, when
I was a child,
my dad had a
sprawling stretch
of land in
Missouri.
He had 200
head of cattle.
We used to run
the cows we
bought at auction
through this
shoot with wooden
beams that closed
on their necks.
My stepmom took
this gun-like object
and put an orange
tag in their ear.

My brother and I used
to play with this black and
white steer.
We called him old #56
because of the number on
his tag.
We chased him, and then he
chased us.
I felt bad for
him, the tag in
his ear.
I talked to my
dad about it.
He said if the steer
ever got lost,
we could find him.
I felt good about that.
I didn't want to lose him.

One night
the following summer,
we were sitting down for
dinner.
I hadn't seen
old #56 for a while.
I asked Dad where
he was.
He didn't say anything.
We were having
t-bone steaks.

As I write this,
my black and white
kitten, Bukowski,
bites at the pen and
tries to wrestle my
wrist as it moves across
the paper.
I'm glad that he
isn't a steer.

this pain like an unwritten poem
only the winter knows how much I loved you
how little I am able to say
the air is tall, the night so deep
I walk in the selfishness of the cold
I walk in this landscape where love is an exile,
a forest without shadows, a party without guests
a happiness without an alibi
something that gets destroyed at the first burst of light
but springs again from the unknown depth of skin

I am in the waiting room of a dying love, a nascent love
while Monalisa is sleeping without dreams
in the depth of my days the certainty of tears
only the winter knows how much I loved you