Boxed red wine and the stench of cigarette smoke
seeping through the cracked door of the back porch
brings back memories of childhood
Another hole in the wall resides next to the liquor cabinet
the size of your father's forehead
You wrote a novel on your wrists with your fingernails
about the stitches he needed from the fall
You wept to me
Saying the fissure in the wall felt
like the countless hours your mother spends
in front of the computer screen playing spider solitaire
She forgot to ask how your first day of school was
for the second year in a row
You don't remember the last time she slept
You said every night spent in that house
taught you what the inside of a coffin feels like
The photograph next to your bed
of a smiling family of four
taken on your seventh birthday
Whispers a story of a mother who refuses to speak
the name of her firstborn child and
Writes its own eulogy
about a light that was put out
fifteen years after it was ignited.
You said time does not heal wounds
it just furthers you from who you once were
what you once had
Now you wake up every night gasping for air
after dreams of a devastated car wrapped around a tree.

Touch can be primal,
sensual, and relieving,
yet rare to receive.

You were the most important poem I ever read.
I didn't have to pretend to understand you
like Emerson
But I memorized you all the same,
like Frost.

Writing poems about poetry
Is problematic, you see.

Poetry is subjective
Changes with every person

Poetry doesn't always stick with you
but sometimes you can't get it out of your head.

Sometimes you want nothing more than for the poem to end
to have never read it

Others you read and re-read and wish you could read it once more
for the first time.

You were the hardest poem I ever read.
I didn't pretend to like all of you
like Whitman
But I loved you all the same
like Dickinson.

You were my favorite poem I ever read.

K.A.

From whence you came, oh specter bright
Allured by sin, this troubled night
The haze of which, its solemn mask
Brings a fate, A fearful task

Upon life’s meager soul I pray
Replace my aura, black to grey
For though I lack an inner light
Allow the grey to seek the white

My poet’s soul I hear it said
Has only words of doom and dread
This be not true, I take to task
If love is all, you needn’t ask

I opened my eyes to only see the void.
So I fill it up.
I fill it up with words, but not any words;
Poetry.

Someday this
Will be quotes
On a calendar of cats