God was dead
Or maybe God took a sick day

I'm going to take this love
This love, which I have poured out into paintings of bouquets,
As if my head was fragile,
Maybe if I let too much sun in, it would melt
So I'm going to take this love
All fluid and slippery
I'm going to save it for later

We skipped invocation
Or maybe we forgot or maybe we just knew
He wasn't coming

On the incredibly biased assumption that He is alive and real in the first place,
Steadfast stubbornness and ignorance,
Failure and grief combined
Have led me to believe that he doesn't give a rat's tail
His rat's tail
His creature

Your necklace...
Reflected stage lights in a way I don't think I can picture
Created wavelengths that flow in all the right directions
Your necklace meets my eyes unlike anything I may have considered
Your voice rides its brilliance and softly balances just inside my ears

He's not with us

She didn't cry in the theater
The sound would have echoed, her mascara would have run
Most undignified
So she went to the bathroom,
Hulled up, all lonely
Undignified doesn't begin to describe it
She lost herself, among the seats and the people she couldn't see against the lights
Among the eyeliner and the uncomfortable dress and the fake nails

He wasn't fair,
Or he was looking the other way
Or he was just wrong
I wanted to believe that he makes no mistakes,
But all the anecdotes, all the crying little girls who grow up to be crying young mothers over their crying children
God wasn't there.

if you need me
i will be far away
dancing in drug induced dreams
with lost loves
and missed memories
in the comfortable coma
of mind altering bliss

s.s

What heals
The burn in the
Back of your
Throat?

I think about the first car I'll ever have,
The Mustang on the side of a highway I've traveled on thousands of times.
And the car I'll be leaving in, on a highway I've traveled on a few thousand times.

My father used to tell my older sister and I that if we wanted to fly
All we had to do was jump and miss the ground on the way back
And we tried
We spent days at a time on that trampoline, jumping and twisting our bodies
And always having something to catch us when we realized we weren't birds

I don't remember when we gave up on flying because we didn't
She bought a car and drove so fast her mind grew wings and she disapeared into smoke stacks of cities I've never heard of
I paid $250 or two weeks of working my part time job and got to really feel it for a couple of hours
My father is waiting for us, like the mesh of that trampoline
To realize that if any kind of bird,
We are homing pigeons

I know what
he likes to be called.
But instead I call him
by what he is and though
he doesn't know it,
it's the truth in
my words that he loves.