Sometimes I wonder

if I even survived
my childhood.

Maybe some part of me
is sleeping
up on the hill.

One of those
Nightmares
That I couldn't escape
Carried me off
In its jaws

and so maybe
I am planted.
Looking down
At all the people
I can't remember.

I hope that I am ashes.
I never wanted a stone.

Do you mean the ones who live on the other side?
Clear across the ocean, two miles in from the tide?

The ones that live with little means or the ones that live like we were meant to?
That work, play, stress, fear, and cry, just like we do?

The men who were created from the earth and the women from Adam's rib?
The ones who fall asleep staring at the same galaxies wondering if we're all there is?

Do you mean the ones in straw houses near dirt roads?
That learn how to survive on the land and wear the clothes that they sew?

Others and me,
I'm sorry, pardon me... I'm just slightly confused
Because when I think of them, I think of me
I can't separate the two.

There was a girl
I used to swap paperbacks
and spit with, once
I fixed her wiper blades,
I remember the soft dead wings
on the windshield,  pretty
as you please

She was alone in her shoes
listening to something
that kept getting darker
and glowing like morning
on the oil spilled under her truck,
she was drifting through
the rosewater of her soft red hair

She only wanted to be rolling
off a swollen river, sliding
out of a clean slip, turning
over in a deep sleep, trailing
a shimmering thread, hiding
under a pile of wet leaves

Then there she was sailing
in her river of blood,  going
white and smelling like smoke
from a struck match behind
closed blinds on a ceramic floor,
a white blouse red as a sharp knife
collecting the light of mourning.

In a field
Turn round and around
Until the sky becomes the earth
Until the wind becomes
The motion to carry a thought
Until love moves at the speed of sound and rests upon a star
And falls on solid ground
With a blanket of the heaven to break its fall

I.

No, don't go now. Please
don't go now; the fog is creating ghosts
out of people and we're breathing clouds out of our mouths.
Tell me about that time when you held your breath
under the lake for six years and still survived;
tell me how if I do that, it'll never work.
I'm not a sea God
any more.

II.

My knees tell better stories than my tongue
ever did, please don't; wretched hive harangues
the mind in a plague, can't you see I'm holding you down
and telling you you're all I ever wanted,
you're all I ever wanted; your head is the stuff of dreams
you're all I ever wanted; you can put your arm
right through me and only feel mist;
I am fog. I'm creating ghosts out of you.

III.

Make it up to me in a rainbow of hues of grey;
at the end of it I'm holding my ribs open. I've never
been more colourful and sad at the same time.
You're the mirrors to my house; stay
has always sounded better than don't go

yet neither seems to work anymore.

the sound of a wave lapping,
summer thickens

and suddenly everything is
vaguely surreal, under the
hidden stomach of the stars

ghosts of silver struggle
in the white light.

when the water splashes
little islands croon.

love, rescues me from
the millions of pieces
where i lie scattered.

.
Each morning I rise unto hours,
Wheeling in sun, with wee wild flowers.

An hearty wish, on hills by the sea

Each day I skip about live stones,
In winds I run, deep dancing my bones.

I am made of each, cairn on hillocky

Each sweep of air a breathy kiss,
On skyline by the sea, one mighty bliss.

Dancing my bones, in winds I run

Each hour a new turning of page,
Each heap on hill, of these I am made.

*Wild wee flowers, wheeling in the sun