It seems like we waited forever in that waiting room
I kept trying your cell
Just to see where you had gone
Until you came back 3 hours later
Looking like ****
Shirt wrinkled
Tie rumpled
Face crumpled

Bruised knuckles

Looked like you had been bargaining with the God of war
It was a week from his funeral and I hadn't ever seen you dressed up since
You came to it in slacks and a wife beater stinking of alcohol

With eyes that looked like fire
like fury
like you were blind
like ice

And I willed myself to walk over to your heavy frame
  Shaking against the wall
But then again I knew nothing I could say
Could somehow make your anger go away

I realised you had every right.

So I just kept whispering a thousand apologies
Mumbled "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so, so, sorry"

Until your bleeding knuckles
Punched the knocked out plaster
And the sound of your bruised bones breaking
Against that ******* wall

Too deafening, for me to hear at all.
And the nurses rushed around you

To try to calm your thoughts
But all I could think of was a gorilla
King Kong
Mighty Joe

Some beautiful ferocious animal
that beat on its chest
Out of anger
Out of fear
Out of pain

I saw you sitting on our front porch
It was a dull, silent day
The kind you find in Colorado
at spring time, early may
And the kids are at school
And the housewives are too busy cleaning the house
cooking their meals
Washing the lipstick stains off their husbands shirts

And you looked cute like little kids do
with a chubby face and baby hands
I sat next to you
and asked you what you were doing
You said "I'm waiting for the rain."
why?
"Because I like the smell of it."

You reaffirmed my sense in humanity then.
Someone who was only 5 years old
You made me want to go home and destroy every razor I had stashed away
Rip out every sad sob story of a poem I had written
Open up every curtain in that death stained house
That smelled like body odor
and human warmth
But it lacked
life

You made me want to scream and cry
and say "yes yes yes you're smart little guy!"

But I stared in amazement as thunder was heard
And now when I hear it, im reminded of your words
As I held your little hands in mine, the neighbour boy
and we danced in the rain as you squealed with delight
five years old with beautiful brown eyes
I could only hope one day Id have a brother like you
That was before my mom had the baby

And you were just a little boy
so every time it rains
I think of that dance
and how it smelled
and how it tasted when I found out that your stepfather had beaten your brains out

     3 years later
        after we'd moved.
That sweet-bitter taste.

of life laughing in your face

blunt tips of bent cigarettes
were incisive as razors -
sliced wrists weeping
bright red sentences,
spattered unborn to blank paper
and turned into statues
so the dead would always remember
what they did,
never safe in the graves
in which they'd took refuge

but blue on blue
was ever her color;
blue on blues
seeping from old sins,
deep, hidden within spidery veins
that traced pale, soft *******,
finally filling mute lips as she slept,
subsumed in oceans of color,
blues that gave stories, as waves to shore
subsided, reclaiming their pain,
and cleansed sand once more

What end to life!
a collection of furies like stone turtles
arranged on the mantle -
just a few dozen last words
tucked among ads for
Old Spice and Polident tabs
unread, used to line
litter boxes in Cambridge
or wrap fresh fish at Hay Market;

then, someone pausing to wave at the sky
missed saving the drowning woman
by years, if he'd tried,
finding questions in every answer;
child curled in hard lap of his mother,
her cold affections of words
blew from dead lips like old wishes
without tender touch or wet kisses;
but that life continued,
if lived only blue on blue

I’ll rewrite my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.
Erasing periods
Commas and uncommon verbs
So my style will mimic yours.
I’ll speak my words
Hundreds,
Thousands of times
In a voice in my head that mimics yours
Hoping they will sound like yours
Hoping they, like yours, will
Will sit at the foot of my bed at night
And seep into my clothes the next morning
Like yours, eddy inside my ears
Hundreds,
Thousands of times.