I could run away to you, world.
drink in your every scent, the dust
the hurt.

backpedal through Venetian streets,
high-five Buddhist monks,
paddle softly through the Dead Sea,
eat Vietnamese fish with blind children,
pound out piles of dough in back-alley German bakeries,
kiss the single root of an aspen tree
and post it all online.

grinning like a devil, silently screaming
*my life is better than yours
my life is better than yours

make a face in the shape
of someone you love to hate,
take away all your mirrors,
there is nothing they show that will help you.

open up.
that heart is more a key
than a gavel, our heads
are so full of locks.

show them your broken fingers.
how you cry when there are
friends in the next room,
sing if the dance music mocks you.  

I hope you are happy
when I breathe,
and even after.

as you walked away, in time
with the settling flakes
your shadow grew small enough to fit
inside a snow-globe,
and so he kept you there
in his display case.

he wore your absence on his face
vacant like a handwritten abcess,
when he shook his head, there were
parts of you that settled behind his eyes
and he looked like a blind man,
lost in his own house.
there was fear tucked into his lips.

what didn’t turn white turned red
what didn’t bleed, break or bruise
gave up on the universe entirely
and dissolved into molecule,
he was nothing without you.
his mouth was an empty room.

he shut us out like a shadow
the light was kept away
and on the last day
that we still knew him,
we found icicles under his bed,
the showerhead frosted shut,
his room smelled like shivers
and dust.
every inch of his heart was silent
every song on his skin was burnt

we buried him in the sun
it was the only thing we had left
to give.

my bed is a crypt without you
my nights are filling with cold
these bones are nothing but hollow tubes
that hold your name
and if I broke all over again,
my body would bleed out
the letters we forgot to send, so

don’t hold me like a dead thing

you can burn your silence,
and I’ll choke on the smoke.

as a child
I wander my young eyes
over hills in the greening
back roads
my love is the sun
how it shone

with the river around me
a breeze through these broken
fence posts,
the water, my home
how it grows, how it grows

like a hope told in silence
the sky is an opening breath
to my hazy goodbyes
and the love I have tucked
in your chest
in your hands
in your eyes.

will you say from the forest
"I kept all your
night cries and hid them in the moss
mixed your heartbeat with bird calls
and named your life a draw"?
or will I still find home
a blue shard in my arm
torn loose like a tooth from
the sand?

two summers ago,
I found myself under a cabbage leaf
curled beneath the sun.
circled in slumber,
like there was never an end to anything.
then, I grew wings
and left my warmth for speed
sacrificing my calm breeze for cold storms
and windy nights.

on my flight home,
I sit through red lights and
look for tear tracks on the
faces of strangers
kissing their cheeks with my eyes
and pretending I can see the salt.
because there is hope left in
loss, my friends.
sometimes, you just have to let
the best things fall.

(how do you think storks still fly?)

so, I spend rush hour
untying the cloth diapers from my ankles
and when the highway pulls
my hills away from me,
I send them flying out the window
like dead birds
knowing
I will never see the seeds
fertilized through their bones
praying God thinks this
is a gesture of my good will.

let us all pray that God notices
our empty hands when we give up
the deepest now for an uncertain future.

Personally, I am praying for a cardboard-box
collection of home movies documenting
the growth of all the people I left,
of all the places thrown behind me
like stale cigarette smoke,
the homes I have broken with
my ever moving feet, my restless
guilty wings.

I will project the shaky film
all over my internals until my
gut is soaked with light
and the last shocked thought
of my quickly fading mind
will be of the things I could have seen,
the memories I would have made
if I had not gone away so much.

If I had just stayed.

but the wind is a vicious thing,
especially the updrafts
especially the hot breath under wings
which gradually convinced me
that my home was a cold dead thing
that there was no life left in my town
that the only world worth seeing was
far far away.

I have burned the eyes
of bluegrass Beethovens dying
slowly on a stage just to prove
that I never needed a quiet place.
that I was above all the country songs
and overalls and camouflage,
but we all need to hide sometimes.
even from ourselves.

I met a woman
with a trumpet tongue
who played her words on
paper, white as truces.
she told me through my stereo
"we've both had days
where the phoenix didn't rise".

we' have all had days
where the phoenix did not rise.
but thank goodness
my birthday was the first time
I heard your lips part
and saw your teeth spill oceans
of blue blankets across my jellyfish eyes.

I wish everyone understood the irony
of writing love poems to a lesbian,
but my hands never seemed to reach
the ends of my arms
like I want them to.

They always get stuck dancing somewhere
in the middle.
playing a tune only they can sway to
knowing all the steps
bouncing off every syllable
while others let their wrists go limp
as if the puppeteers needed strings
to tune their fiddle
for a happy song
somewhere far far away.

so take my breath again
keep it wherever it is that you keep
the gasps our ears give you
as your words pull the
heartstrings we forgot we had
that we forgot how to play
to wave our wet-noodle fingers and
conduct a life worth living
so full of blatant love
not afraid to make no sense
my chest was an rusty locket
the day before I heard you
and now I am so full of echoes
from it's tiny, timid click.

For Andrea,
you are a sketchbook muse,
something I have to guess at on my
worst days when there are no words
and the rain smells like a swan song
from the sky.

you kept me writing when there
was nothing left to draw
or sing or smell or see anymore.
when there was black smog
between my eardrums pounding out
the dying breath of clouds
you held me through tinny earbuds
and poems I etched in the moss
running over back roads in my mind

so I hope
you find peace
every time you find a microphone
and that someday, I'll play you a tune
which echoes through you,
with a tiny, timid
click
and a full breath
that resuscitates the open blue
until we are both whole beneath it
until, again, we are true.