this happiness possesses the fragility of
freshly painted walls, so easily marred
by an accidental shoulder brush, exposing
the dingy grey beneath, once white, like the balloons
we hung outside the house when we moved in,
but they fell, at the leisure of the wasted breath
I filled them with, though now, now it is just the stone
floors and I, and a silence that is not quite a silence,
more so the whispers of a church,
or the sound that a cloud makes as it drifts away,
there and then gone, without warning,
a glass figurine propped against a doorstop-
one hard push and it will crumble into glacial shards,
crystalline dust that I will piece back together, even though
the scars will always be visible, and that is fine,  wonderful even,
because it is so beautifully human, and
because perfection is a plateau, and
I would rather climb a ladder of rotten wood
because each rung unbroken is a step up, and
because I love the way my heart jumps anxiously
against my rib cage whenever I stop to look down.

I realized the other day
That poetry has become
How I color in the gray
How I scrape up the ****
And salvage it

At times I think it’s nonsense
Stanzas of here and there
Of love and its expense
A sad whispered prayer
To someone, to no one

But looking back
To how I wrote then
And how I crack
Like leaky pottery when
I write now

I understand
Who I was then
& How unplanned
time and time again
I find myself alone

You came to me flawless
Skin smooth and unbruised
And my arms were painted
Scars from the past exposed

And I tried to assure you
That you would come away clean
That love doesn’t hurt
That love isn’t mean

But you walked away decorated
One arm black, one arm blue
Tattoos from clinging too tightly
To someone who wanted to run

The sharp words we threw around
Dug deep into your skin
Leaving permanent lines
Etched into your porcelain arms

Yet, I’ve spotted you lately
With skin smooth and unbruised
You hide your scars from the world
With an innocent smile

Thinking back to the first fast days when our hearts burned with the indigestion from the chest to chin,
Butterflies flying high and wild in our stomachs at the touch of our skins.
We ran quickly into the lives of one another that May Day that first brought in our summer.
Under the sun that smoulders and scorched our shoulders, we walked into the flames that burned we were younger.

Twenty years down the line our hearts have grown colder.
A blockage has come between us, but we can’t move the boulder.
I’ve even tried to dig up our love’s old grave and shake the corpse back to life,
But try as I might it lies limp, it’s body as frail as its owner.

We’ve tried treading water in the cold blue seas.
Though our arms tired and we drifted to our knees.
The current dragging us down stream and beyond the river,
Nothing will reprise our best years gone by and the time that I have given her.

I still hunger for those days when we didn’t fight.
Those days that kept blazing on and on golden bright.
Those long summer days that never wanted to turned into night.
But maybe one day under the sun that'll smoulder and scorch our shoulders, we will once again walk into the flames that burned like they did when we were younger.