Don't approach a dog unknown to you
Holding out your hand, making eye contact
You may frighten him
Let him come to you

Don't write a poem uninspired
It won't work out
In good time
Let it come to you

Don't go out there seeking love
Like a child with a butterfly net
Live your life
Let it come to you

Morning rises over Philadelphia
and cracks the sky;
untangles legs once intertwined.
Sun beams pierce through the window,
Revealing two bodies withdrawn to distant sides
of the hotel bed,

The night spent chest to chest
will forever be kept in the dark.

Warm breath lingers under sheets,
hugs gentle
and whispers,
"I'm sorry."
I lay here now
within the fine line boundaries of this love
and a piece of me must mourn for what may never be.
But I have found there is more truth to this holding
as it speaks for all the words that have gone unspoken,
all the unanswered questions.
I breathed you in deep,
awake to remember your skin.
Intertwined in ways more than just the extremities of our Earlthy bodies,
my soul is at ease knowing a piece of you
will always be held within a piece of me.

sing a song for your lover
of honeyed milk and seabird cries.
say a prayer for your lover
and hope to god she’ll listen.

burn for your lover
in the fires of your own joy.
drown for your lover
in the waters of your own misery.

dance for your lover
til your bones shatter and your lips split.
bow for your lover
til your hips give out and the roses die.

you love like spiralling souls:
around and around again.

Azure sapphires glint and dance
Below the fields still flower in France
As debris blow and snow does fall
White silence in the space of souls
It is meaningless; it is not fair
Here lie solid absences and despair
We were many; now we are but few
They fell, fell right on through.

I will never forget the sound
of their bodies as they hit the ground.
How the gutter ran red with their blood
when no other escape could be found.

Our ladders were too short, you see-
They were eight floors from the ground.
All these young factory girls
like bundles of rags falling down.

I will always remember the screams
Of one girl with flames in her hair
who appeared at a window one moment,
then in the next , wasn’t there.

I walked through the ashes soon after
trying to make sense of things.
We counted three dozen more victims
and discovered a number of rings.

It started here on the eighth floor;
a stray ash from a last cigarette.
There was plenty of fuel for the fire
That this city will never forget.

when I think about the story of you,
a small dimpled child growing up to be a poisoned soul,
i think about the days when your veins were not pumped with sadness and *pain