Come here girl, you know there’s no point
in skulking.  This is what you deserve.  You know
I’m not responsible.  It’s not my fault
you can’t cook right.  Don’t hate me
for my sense of duty.  
                    You’re so frail;
even that chicken-wire crosshatched skeleton
can’t hold you up.  Get my newspaper.
                    There’s  simply no point in weeping.

Sometimes, I thought your eyes looked waterlogged,
wet enough to pour floods of biblical
proportion.  I knew you as an ocean;
you slipped through knobby fingers with each pulse.
You growled like waves, and growling, you beat salt
into sunburn with the ferocity
of three thousand hurricanes—no more, no
less.  My palm fronds will always sway for you.

But you never swayed, stayed, or even said
what you meant as your whitecap words washed blind
over coral.  You stung though, full of bone
shards and plastic.  Let’s face it, you’re filthy.
You smell like oil and death. Your rotting weeds
strangle the pilings of flimsy gray docks.

Bare skeletons cast their shadows
from your temporary closets, and bruise
your casual grins with their bleached-bone fists.
You left
here this morning with a carry-on
just to find three bags checked in your name.


Someday your luggage will know
continents, leaving trails
of letters, love songs and photographs.
You will not see these places,
these ancient beauties,
like she did, through the dust
of your travels
beaten grey from army green foot lockers.


Little white tags crumble dates
and loneliness into your sheets.
Your smiles come slower; your tendons ache
in their restless sleeps.
The years of calloused fingers
fumbling latches in the dark
leave your nails jagged
and ******.


But you carry her voice in your suitcase always
knowing her weight would sink into your bones.

A friend of mine told me
I was in love
with you, of all people--
my jaded romantic,
hopeless and cynical,
fictitiously crafted.

I told her she was wrong
emphatically--
that I didn't fall
(in love or otherwise)
for boys like you,
uncertain and determined
to be anything and everything--
mostly because I refuse
to allow you to be right.

The evenings cold enough to require a sweater
but still too warm for the biting winter wind,
to cut through our clothing
like hot knives through butter;
these are the not-quite nights,
the dusks of the almost-autumn
and the too-late summer,
with the drizzle dripping requiems
for sunshine longings and July dreams.

These are the nights that I am torn
between walking alone with the chill in my bones,
sedate with the cold but alive,
or begging for a body
to drift alongside,
radiating an unreciprocated warmth;
someone with hands stuffed
into night-bitten pockets,
too cool and stiff to really chatter
but hoping for the shared sympathy
of frozen, rain-speckled skin.

We are gliding across the fallen leaves--
the dying brethren of the trees--
that crackle slow beneath our feet
like summer candy wrappers, drifting.
But we’re still slowly freezing,
shrugging threadbare shoulders
under threadworn sweaters
that still reek of the past.
And we’re still gently waltzing,
disinterested fingers on uninteresting waists
trampling scarlets and golds under
careless heels in three-four beats.

As the twilight fades into ink,
a hollow, whispering breeze reminds
of the clouded distance between us
and the heavy, rain-laden sky.