bashed my own heart
into so many pieces
i know i'll never find them all
there will always be holes
our histories will haunt me
like a scar i want to keep
wrap myself in ice
brace for elevation drops
i can't drive far enough away
i don't want to stay if you go
invite the telephone to never
ring with your voice again

dedicated banishment
self inflicted, echoing
physical displacement
from permanent coronary scarification
devouring accidentally my lacerated pulmonary edema
cauterizing weakness into cement
thermodynamically frozen muscles

umbrellas on parade in your city
netherworld for my regret
disreputable raincoats rubbery ebbing
against a tide of discontent
ringing out like let-downs

fist famine in the ice box
where the ear flap hats and
rusted tin whistle tombs
ever after frost-framed faces
the color of very chilled blood
echo singular clapping
through institutional hallways

try to look to you
if we see i can go on
in this dark unquiet place
then i smile and
look at those eyes
we make good partners in crime
you and i
but you be strong
don't stand up to be counted

the beer in front of her is just about empty and she watches the foam slowly sludge down the inside of the glass with thinly veiled disgust...she manages a fake smile as someone nearby is telling a group of giddy faces another embarrassing story about her...she crushes out her cigarette so clumsily a spark of tobacco coal leaps out and lands on the floor...voices are traveling around the room and ******* up the lighting, sweeping the ceiling and splashing through the windows out into the city night...fairly drunk she steps outside and tries to remember what had she been thinking a moment before clacking down the stairwell in her most comfortable high heels...the early summer evening air is cool in the back of her throat and the breeze pulls the newly dark lime tree leaves spreading that indescribable scent of mature summer green down the empty street...somewhere down the block a car alarm finishes it's cadence leaving the lone barks of a dog...the feeling she had about not deciding what to leave behind she'd lost somewhere at the beginning of this party...she'd find herself crying about this new regret long before she knew why...another addition to the myriad topics for insomnia that she'd write on the bedroom wall with her eyes...recalling the painful parts of the past with so much more depth perception than the good...like her happiness was an instant suffocated in years of desperation and insanity...she had to convince herself that she was happy with him...that she could be again...that she would stop wishing for him to disappear and leave her blameless for not loving him back...as it would turn out the wreckage was so minimal and she was the one forced to disappear...it took her two hours to pack and she was gone...

his breath washed against me
like the sea into a pier
in the brown gloom of his basement apartment-
the greenness of our unemployed summer days
halted by Arsenault's phone call

those deep azure ripples in the mohawk river
tinged with creamy moonlight
brought this life to the shore
here we go lie down, lie down-
a conjectural pernicious crimson tide

we wore black as midnight
like still, ominous birds
shrouded, our eyes a profligate deluge,
the cemetery inundated with pink brio
and the ****** yellows of inexpedient sunshine

calling the *** kettle-black,
a blackberry stain on the sheets of eternity.
the gun smoke clouded streets of Vienna
miles and miles of muscle.
birch bark littered pockets of november
like whirring needles
that sing in your heart.
the body's limitless wealth of holes,
voiceless, writhe out of our eyes
like lights in the sea.

for the friends i have loved and lost...i am not afraid to say the last thing i have to say to a long time companion...for i know that they have and will hear me...that it is the right and perfect thing to say, because it is me and all of my heart...singing as i go along so that i do not break...

she raised me, as much as my mom and sister did, and i thought i was different...that i wouldn't crack and divide...but i suppose sometimes i am that girl...who falls apart into a ball of tears...because my nanny is like the nervous system for my family, she's just too interconnected, just too big to fail...to fall...

and we always want the fall of our heroines to be graceful and gorgeous...but sometimes it's just bleak and plain...sometimes you watch your mentor, grandmother, caretaker, great friend, nanny die slowly...though it kills you and you fight for her with all this nervous frightened energy, this what will i do without her...

so i let my heart sing...because it hears her, it knows her, it is as much in tune with her as anyone else it loves...i let it be happy to honor what she wants...it's the closest i can come to praying...letting my heart sing and joy and bounce...letting it loose to the terror of my own embarrassment...

i will miss this, i will miss you...you kept the light on in the last homely house...i know that this will break my heart into so many pieces i will never find them all...there will always be holes the size and shape of you...