What is it like to be you?
To see through your eyes,
To slip on your shoes?

Do you wonder about me, too?
Do you picture my life,
Consider my point of view?

Ah, reality.
A tricky little ****
In a suit of mirrors
To reflect what suits the beholder.

If time is a soldier
Reality is the battlefield
and the prize to be won
Or lost, as it were.
And we are.

Losing.

The last green leaf on the tree
And the labor-and-delivery nurse at hour eleven,
The ancient peeling bathroom wallpaper
And the old dog,
The third shift gas station attendant
And the 20-year-old converse at the back of the closet,
The moon in the morning
And the sun at night,
And me.

Alone in the living room
Clean and bare legged,
I’m holding up my end of the bargain.

We always seem to meet this way,
In the quiet alien landscapes of familiar places after dark.
The day’s events have been embossed upon the air in double negative and committed to the house’s memory,
the subjects of future dreams for unknown sleepers.

What is it about the living room at night?
This place vibrates with implied movement, yesterday’s air has been spent and collected,
the new day’s fresh chaos has yet unsounded.
The quiet is so much deeper here in the in between.
It’s the quiet, then.
The quiet is what I’ve been seeking.

So I slow my breathing and wait.
We didn’t plan this, she and I. We never do.
If it is pitch dark early morning and I find myself waiting alone,
I know that I was called here,
That there is business to attend to.
She always shows eventually.

How have you been, she’ll ask.
I’ll take a moment to collect my thoughts.
It’s been far too long.

In the unknowable eye of space
or heaven
The Voice of God sings
or does not sing.

It is up to you to decide:
Is silence absence?
Or is it the intake of breath
between phrases?

We the gentle
Are meant for
Sentimental
For charcoal pencil thumb-smudged skies
Over lamplit rented rooms on the Seine
Moonlight gauzey glamoured eyes
Grimy hands that write paint spin, throw clay,
that grab our grandfather’s violin at all hours of the day and play.
Mad with passion,
starving, raving, gorged on lush love-struck life abundant,
on rain-slicked splendor.

We the gentle
Bend toward each other in salvation as sunflowers turn inward in the absence of sunlight.
Salvation.
It’s all wrong
We do not belong do not belong.
Bloodletting stardust into the vents
Hearts rent and free bleeding
Feeding the over fed
No page or paint, no violin
No romance, no gods here
But Death and Dread.

We the gentle
Get no roses but see red red red with arms outstretched,
Fighting the tide
Soft bodies open minds
Not weak but kind
Once fruit, now rind
We aren’t meant for these times.
Clear eyed and noncompliant,
We who know the essence of Love Defiant,
Truth in muck, truth in starlight,
We feel the press on all ******* sides
To run, to hide

And instead sing, paint, play
Write.

This song is written on my heart.
Each note hangs in the air before turning to smoke
and we inhale it here in your little bed,
breathe it in as we have most nights since you were born.

Not so long ago
I was someone else
Who was not your mother.
You don’t know her,
the Me who spent months of her young life poring over the sheet music.
I still have it, teenage pencil scratch covering the entire first movement.
“Sticky top notes” and “written when he was going deaf!” and rows of chord forms,
glyphs,
a cipher.

(Did you know:
Beethoven was dead when Ludwig Rellstab compared the famous first movement of his Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor to moonlight shining on a lake?
The sonata previously entitled “Quasi una fantasia.” Almost a fantasy.
The sonata written in blood from a broken body and a broken heart.
Poor dead Beethoven. Our art is truly not our own).

It strikes me odd
that a song such as this one
has become what it has become.
Radiance in despair, I suppose,
is universal in its bright raw frankness.
We stare. It stares back.

Tonight, blessedly,
that chasm of grief alive still and forever in the delicate weaving vines of plaintive melody stemming darkly from it
is far from your door.
Your breaths are slow and even now.
The song closes,
as it always does,
trying and failing to claw out of the darkness.

But you don’t know that.

Tonight it’s just a beautiful song.
And I am no one else
but your mother.

Full moon in Pisces,
aching broken fullness
desperate, hungry fullness.
Alarming.

We’ve been here before, you and I.

Ah, you give yourself away -
a lingering hand,
the curve of the small of my back
alive, electric,
hot beneath hot fingers,
fabric barrier thin and waning,
pressed.

We’ve been here before.

There is supple space,
a secret green bud
within the tangle of autumnal shed
for you for you,
thought dead now glowing
hot and red
tenderly doomed,
a September tomato.

Pluck while it’s still green;
we both agreed
there’s no other way to go
but to seed.