i.
no matter what your teachers
may tell you, your grades are not a
measure of how smart you are, that
has more to do with how you handle your
heart, and i have never seen anyone love
more fiercely or smart than you.  

ii.
i have let boys touch me just because
i was scared to lose them; don't let them
lay a hand on you without you asking
them to, you are worth more than that.

iii.
people will walk away, but you've known
that already.  keep your chin up so that when
they turn back one last time, they know that
you don't need them.
you don't need them.

iv.
i hope you find somebody that holds your
hands, even when you're nervous and
they start to sweat.  if they pull away,
you come find me and i swear,
i won't let go.

October roads are littered with nostalgia;

auburn and crimson embers sink

like ash to the ground,

perpetually estranged from the spirited conflagration

as an old man is estranged from his wife of fifty years

after knowing her when her eyes bore the lucidity of an autumn sky,

after knowing her when her fair hair was full and gleaming,

after knowing her when she was able to distinguish the fact

that he was the man she loved,

before her mind became opaque and disjointed,

before her skin became as brittle as a desiccated maple leaf,

before she lost the steadiness to hold a sheaf of papers

without causing them to tremble

as a blazing autumn oak tree trembles lugubriously in the wind.



As he crunches down the

worn, flaming path,

his arthritic fingers clumped in a gnarled fist

deep within the recesses of his jacket pockets,

the old man smiles dejectedly as a young couple passes by,

their spry Labrador trotting happily by their side.

How it was, he muses, scuffing a stone along with his shoe,

to hold her hand and walk down here this time every fall.



A few minutes later he happens across a spindly sapling,

its arms thin as matchsticks,

its leaves defiantly clinging to its last remains of green

despite knowing that ruthless Nature will inevitably drain it all away.

The sight of this display of childish insubordination

reminds him of his son,

once a boy as small as that little tree

with convictions as grand as a red oak.

The man turns his face and shuffles along;

he has neither seen

nor heard

from his son for several years now,

not since her death drove him away to a place

where autumn does not exist;

to dwell upon it is to be struck

with great sorrow and longing,

like strained branches keening under intense wind.



Turning around,

the old man hunches his shoulders

in a futile effort to keep the chill from freezing his ears.

He grimaces; his hip never was the same,

not since the accident.

She patched me up, though, he recalls longingly,

she patched me up real good.

Didn’t even need a doctor. He chuckles.

Didn’t even need a doctor.

I bet she could’ve stitched me up better

with a needle and that blue thread of hers

than that uppity man with his nose in the air

like he was trying to find the sun.

And he didn’t do a good job, neither.

But I know she could’ve.

She could do just about anything.



A troupe of jack-o-lanterns grin

with the unrefined skill of young children on his neighbor’s porch.

Massaging his leg as he hobbles by,

he sighs and coughs. He looked so **** cute that year—

musta been around six or seven—in that cowboy costume.

She did a real good job, putting that whole outfit together.

Even made a holster and everything.

Felt a little bad for the kid

when she wouldn’t let him put a fake gun in it, though.

The old man cranes his neck to face the twilit sky.

You don’t mind if I let him have it, anyway,

do you, darling?

I know you always said I babied the kid,

said I’d turn him into a cube of sugar,

but he came out to be a good grown man, didn’t—



He stops mid-sentence,

unable to utter that very last word.

Standing at the lip of his driveway,

he pulls his hands out of his pockets

and pries his stiff, tangled fingers apart.

Night has fallen.

So, it seems, has his happiness.

Grim sonnets fraught with fraud and trauma stuff
her notebooks—steamy, bitter memories
of finished romance, rarely with enough
sweet lip syrup—ripe with frivolities,
important drama, broad license.  She needs
an audience like green things need daylight.
I’m the sun to her bright lily.  She reads
with fierce emotion—I squeeze my arms tight
around me, choke a chuckle—she pretends
I’m just amused at her soul-piercing style.
So much to ask, this ritual she tends
like a garden?  I feign attention while

she rails at love and fate, lips pursed or drawn—
sarcastic, crushed, dismayed her youth is gone.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.