To climb out of a mother’s womb
            And plant the bitter kiss of betrayal
To furtively compose a song for Dad
            And cry echoes into a torn drum’s shell
To crawl one’s way into a city’s heart
            And drink alone into the dead of night
To make love on top of clean sheets
            And disappear before morning dew
To slip a tattered ring onto her finger
            And bury her beneath Evergreen stars
To build a treehouse with green hands
            And burn it down to a silhouette of ashes
To rest old bones in a rocking chair
           And weep over tight-lipped children
To wonder at the edge of a mountain's peak
           And fall into infernal echoing abyss

               To live
                                Or,
                                          To not live

Pine needles dance with the wind
To taunt me,      
Bushes crowned with lilacs breathe sweetness
To ****** me,
Rubber wheels rolling over rails screech to a halt
To rebuke me,
Plastic soles burrow into wet cement
To leave a trail,
Pray I may retrace it –
At sunset,      
To bury my face
In the bosoms of flowers,
And dance with the wind

Little golden haired girl that skips down wooden stairs,
Her pigtails swing in the air as she lands on the sidewalk
Where I used to bury acrid smolders of my cigarette sticks
And laugh with the rabbit toothed woman who coughed too much.
I breathed smoke from her yellow teeth but now the girl,
With rosy cheeks and beady eyes jumps over puddles in yellow boots
She glances with red cheeks and falls face first into brown muck,
To be held up by a man who walks, talks and looks
Nothing like me.

In the cold nights of winter the girl, the woman and the man
Melt themselves in each other’s warmth, I stand alone
Behind their window rubbing my red chest,
Flirt with myself to knock, to go inside
and slice the apple pie and slurp the eggnog.
My fingers immobile, short fragile icicles
But the black beady eyes pierce through pane,
A wide smile with missing teeth calls out
To hold a gaze through  watering eyes.
They see her as an old photograph
Of the woman who would run her  fingers
through knots of hair as I cried on her lap.
I press frozen hands against the glass,
Peer into flickers of those dark gleamy eyes  
And see the mother and daughter walk on sand
with naked feet
and me,
hand in hand.

A rose once bloomed in a ***
At the edge of my bedroom window counter.
Stem slithered towards sunlight
And soon pricked the widow pane.
So I plucked it and locked
It in my shoebox.
Without the sun,
Soon my rose withered,
So I buried it under a tree in the backyard.

They whirled and twirled to claim each other
But held their breaths and missed the other.
Or that's what I had hoped took place
The ego now bruised still drowns in limerence.