He pulls my hand
and I stumble up the stairs
holding two backpacks, four books
and a lunchbox full of old toy cars,
nearly tripping
but landing instead on the second floor landing.

The blinds covering the window in front of me
split slightly,
just enough
for me to see her smiling eye watching me.

I don't know her name
and she doesn't know mine.
we've never said anything real to each other.
we know nothing about each other
other than that she spends a lot of time there
at her grandparents house,
speaking Portuguese, Spanish and English
and listening to Spanish rap on the balcony
loud enough to hear through the floor
of the apartment I only spend six days in a month
and over the occasional fight between my family.

That's all she knows of me;
my fleeting ghost walking with my brother past their window
thirty or so times a month,
talking
but almost inaudibly, and never to her.
wish i knew her better
than as the eye peeking through the blinds



©Brandon Webb
2012

Have you ever found yourself  quivering
outside of lines
stained
by what you thought was a love story?
Wondering
if you will be swallowed whole
by the window you sit and stare out,
in love's well meaning glory.

Beneath passion  blowing through the door
visiting your mind
like those little things
filled with a warmth
you have wanted
for so long.
Often, you find life
is at its happiest inside your dreams,
where nothing's wrong.

Sometimes in the middle of the night  
you want to be
a never-ending flow of love
smiling at the hands
on the Clock of Emptiness,
stuck in place.  
However, time melts into years
until starlight becomes well versed
at hiding the shadow of tears
on your face.

You’re a cold nostalgia
because you’re still my
this time last year
sitting on the Pendleton
stoop asking me why
like you always would
and I’d always say
because. I never really
knew an answer, I only
knew I did.
And in this way we were
good but I always knew
I’d end up ****** and
without you. I cried when
I moved out the studio
off Euclid Avenue. I sat
by myself in a different
emptiness than the one
we moved into. Then, I too
left for good.
And in the ways the night
is wanted, I never sleep
alone. And all the love
that I’ve had since, I tell
them why because
I don’t.

I long for what I’ve never known: a word
that captures the foreign feels of speech surging
from my throat, the ways they shake and crack with
fury and failure as I break away
from the safety of silence, in jagged
and fragmented sentences–I’m desperate
to seize meaning, trying words like puzzle
pieces, I’ll force them to fit together
to form the spaces of pieces missing.
My greatest fear is to be incomplete.

And I’m constantly reminded of this
over coffee-talk and shared politics
as I recoil shyly in forced defense
of each vowel, and every consonant
and the myriad of their constructions:
they are stuck behind my eyes. I am left
apologizing for my vagueness and
for the grey shades of embarrassment and
finite language–when a dictionary
is never a long enough read for the
lone, longer walk around the circumference
of my head–or any red eye flight I have
ever caught that takes me from thought to thought:

the moving belts of baggage claim don’t
have to tell me of the luggage I lost.
As possessions were plucked from circuitry
I clung to the emptiness as if it
was mine and took it home as leverage.
I write in circles ’til I’m motion sick.
I write myself into thought-asylums
where silence is another language:
a slow germination of roots lacing
down the bell-curve of my spine.
A foreign tongue, An othered alphabet.

I'm so tired
Of crying myself to sleep
The pain of those awful memories
Sometimes It's like no one knows me
I am so broken
No one understands
I was crushed and defeated by those hands
And now I sit wasting away
Hiding beneath covers to scarred to face the day
I can feel it like a thousand daggers
Beating into my flesh
But I can't cry
And I can't feel
I'm starting to doubt if this is real
Maybe I should run
No I'm so done
I might as well say goodbye ...

Judy sat
in one of the seats
in the pub garden
and spoke

of the university course
she was going for
in the late summer
and you sat opposite her

watching her as she spoke
taking in her blue eyes
and her little quaint nose
and her dark hair

held back
with blue ribbons
and you remembered
the kisses

of the evening before
while she waited with you
while you waited
for the bus back to town

and how that last kiss
was held by you
all the way home
and packed away

in the mind
in that part
you keep
for good moments

and she stopped talking
and sipped her Coke
and you said
you want to be a lawyer?

yes
she said
I’ve always wanted
to be lawyer

even as a little girl
and you tried
to imagine her
in wig and gown

in some high court
cross examining
some criminal
or maybe defending one

and she said
I got that parcel
you sent me
that Mahler 6th symphony

in the box
you smiled
you shouldn’t
waste your money

on me  
she said
I’m not worth it
of course you are

you replied
no I’m not
she said
but I love you

you said
I know
but although
I like you

I can’t  say
I love you
as easy as you
say you love me

and she sipped her drink
and you sipped your beer
and you wondered
if you would ever hear

her say the words to you
but she never did
and so at the end
of the year

after the Christmas gift
she gave you
and the farewell kiss
you never saw her anymore

some things you want
you can’t have
no matter how much
you adore.