Wishing to slip back into my loneliness,

I cover myself with a rain sheet, mud, and leaves.

Turn my back to the wind, and let

the world pound against my knobby bones.

Cold, bitter, I want to be

Alone.



The forest behind me, the spirits in the trees,

their cackles mixing in with the wandering thieves.

Steal from me my worries and sorrow,

take from me

what tomorrow will bring, surely,

I feel that their stories never leave me.



Too loud, too loud! I scream for the storm

to pour down harder, release this aura

of spell-bound lovers. If my scent is

refreshed, discarded and replenished,

I can be free.



I will take to the sea

what tomorrow will bring, surely,

and wash it away before it can haunt me further.

Trusting the free fall more than I should,

for it treats me better than solid ground could,

I let my disguise fal

ter and a pearl of laughter escapes me.

If you can manage

to resurrect my words from the furnace,

I beg your interest

stay long enough to read them

all

and that you’ll still hold me

as the mirror falls off

the wall,

the lake spilling out and

drowning my reflections.

The arena crowds my thoughts,
A thousand messages, a thousand stars,
but all I can feel is you.

You taught me how to breathe,
But now I can’t sing.

Lead into Chorus:

Water’s in my lungs,
Quickly filling up,
And I just miss the taste of air.

Chorus:

You’re all that I can see,
But there’s a galaxy out there,
And I just want to see the light.

I don’t know how to separate
From this love gone sour, this heart beat dissipating.
I miss someone who isn’t here,
a stranger in the bar who drinks my bittersweet air.

Some say I should seek a fortune teller,
someone who can cure my slumbers.
I just miss the taste of dreams.
Take me back to sleep.

Water’s in my lungs,
Quickly filling up.
And I just miss the taste of air.

You’re all that I can see,
But there’s a galaxy out there,
And I just want to see the light.

I don’t know how to separate
From this love gone sour, this heart beat dissipating.
I miss someone who isn’t here,
a stranger in the bar who drinks my bittersweet air.

I’m blind and lost in a crowded room,
But you can see straight through.
You’re the only ghost I’ve ever met,
And now all I want is to forget.
Go, go, go go away ghost.
Won’t you, go go, go go away ghost
Won’t you, go go, go go away ghost
Please go go, go go away ghost?

One person sings chorus as another sings “ghost” lines. Intensity builds.

Then, quietly:

Go, go, go go away ghost.
Won’t you go haunt somebody else?

I’ve already exhausted my heat source.
There’s not much left to take of me.
I wonder when he will disappear,
turn ‘round the corner and never return.
He’ll ask for a dollar, and I’ll give him a dime.
I found it in my pocket, maybe on the ground.
I can’t remember, honestly, does it even matter now?

This is an attempt to hold on, to grip the edges of the rope
pulling up the plank bridge we stand on.
Is this love or is this war, or
am I just making it a bit of both?
The birds want to stay and make a nest,
but their feathers keep shedding in this cold.
This isn’t normal. This isn’t home,
so they fly south for the winter.
Is it Christmas in July, I wonder?

I’ll sit in familiar coffee shops and write
bad poetry while I nibble at chicken salad and fries.
The barista wears blue overalls and white,
and he smiles, oh he smiles, every time I walk by.
Two hippies sip iced drinks outside, framed by the window,
wearing ombre skirts, edges dancing on the ground, and
silver rings on every finger—turquoise, or birth stones perhaps
in the middle. And they muse about thousands of little things
that they will accomplish. Their babies will wander
in every world, no fear diminishing their travels.
Is it too late to grow young with the new age dreamers?

I find myself craving a cigarette, though I can’t remember
the last one I let dribble smoke down my throat.
A black and white scene, picturesque, so free,
standing on the street corner, any one, with relief wrapped in
thin little paper, tucked between *******, and kissing my lips,
the only lover I’ll never miss.
Replacing one bad path with another was ill-advised, I’ll admit,
but the flower blooming so early was too beautiful of a sight.
I think I see snow falling already in the street,
and we’re on the cusp of August, is it time to say goodbye?

Cold wonderings ***** at my back, and I
slide my hand, with a palm heated from another night,
across my bare skin.
I’m learning to love myself when no one else can,
and at least, for a moment,
forget whose door I just walked out of.

Let me be light, let me be light tonight.
Let this path be my air, my destination a distant sight.
Consider a rooftop, where I can see the pale moon,
hiding between the Twin Towers’ ghosts.
Maybe it can goad this artificial light
out of my cold
tile home.

Let me be light, let me be light tonight.
Let my heart be as hollow as the shining white knight.
This concrete, it screams—what song does it sing?
I am tired of sleeping with burnt eyes and lost dreams.

My shoes feel so heavy in my hand,
but the gravel has numbed my bare feet’s skin,
and I whisper to you, my poet in hand,
let me be light, let me be light for you.

I wish you’d let the sky shine bright for you.
It’s so blue outside, the good kind.
Move the curtains to the side, sneak a glimpse,
Sip the air
slowly
and whistle it out.
Step carefully so you can hear the porch steps creak
and feel the wood under your bare feet without
worrying about the splinters. There aren’t any.
Just come outside.

The fields will part when the time is right,
and the sky will illuminate the guiding side.
And when you find that the earth can hold your weight,
that the world won’t collapse when you confess your fate,
you’ll see how the clouds shield you just the right way
from the hard rays of the sun, but you can still see the glow.
And it may time some time, your feet may burn and sore,
Blister even, maybe, but time heals all wounds, I swear,
Even the worst of heartaches.
Even my heart is breathing again, slowly.
It is

pumping.
Just consider that if glass shards can be glued back together, mirrors hung
back on the wall for Snow White to get ready in, and the
veins in my wrist sealed back up with love and rain,
there is another day for you to see.
I am not porcelain. I am weak,
But every time I am broken to the ground,
I rise like the willow tree.
There’s a reason she’s my favorite—
For she haunts her pleasures and cries all day,
But seeps her sorrows into the ground till her spirit
Rises back up through her veins.
The rings of the tree reflect not just her age, but her strife.
This woman has been broken. She’s crumbled yet rised.

She never dies, only cries.
The willow tree will always survive.

She found out on a Thursday,
And the last time I slipped the smoke
Down my throat was Wednesday,
So I guess you could say this is Day Three.
Is it recovery
If you don’t see yourself as an addict?
But I guess every addict says that, don’t they?
And so begins the blessed unrest.

Each word laced with resentment,
I wonder how we’ll make it through this,
And I’ve asked her not to twist the phone cord
in her hands and scream at me from across the
kitchen because three summers ago,
she did,
and I sank far deeper than this.

The anxiety didn’t hit me until last night.
It crept up my back, like it was climbing each ****
In my spine hour by hour, till it finally touched the
Spirals of my brain and said, hey, let’s
Shock
A girl into feeling some pain.

I curled up in my bed with comforters over my head
and my phone lit up with his name.
He had gotten a text, was concerned, I guess,
And he listened as I rambled my achy words,
My humbled breaths.
There is nothing to hold back anymore.
I can’t afford to resist the tide much longer.

But I found
That he could distract me from the pain,
Involve me in another game,
A political drama not on the silver screen, but quite
Worthy of being.
We played with a deck of cards, building a house, seeing
How far it could go before falling down.
And when he said he had to go, he was home,
I didn’t even notice the skipped heartbeats anymore.