i'll paint stars on your ceiling
to keep you close to heaven
even heaven wasn't enough
to make you want to stay
if you want hell's fire
i swear i'll burn hotter
i'll give you so much love
it'll wash your sin away

the fire you built
to keep us warm
is burning me to death.

It wasn't until they pretended to love me
That I felt the most alone.

it's abut 9pm and I decide I don't want to be alone



there was a car crash earlier that day up west towards Salida--
some Kansas man who was killed by a driver trying to pass
in the right lane, declared deceased on scene, another man
from Monument who was air-lifted to St. Thomas Moore,
no critical injuries.

I tend to ask God for these big signs, signs that I'll recognize. I tell him
that they need to be something I'll notice because you know me, sometimes I can't hear you. Anyway, signs, crashes. A Kansas man died.  It's 9pm and I pull on some jeans and leave the house.

I'm supposed to be at a rodeo dancing, but maybe I wasn't supposed to be there after all. I have this white dress in my closet that you can't even see, tucked between everything else because it's so thin, lays flat beneath the aztec smocks and cream cardigans. I take it out and brush it off, thread my fingers through the open lace--

10pm. When I breathe soft enough the stars look like they're hanging on strings, like I could reach up and snap them off,
they'd be no bigger than dew drops on a spider web
so light they'd drift up in the night breeze and
set up in my own natural atmosphere.

What good would it have done me to be there? I only ask
myself to assuage the warm fear i've been feeling since Friday
night, a lingering umbrage I did not think would stay--
I can see the white stitches in my jeans that look
like they're glowing,
smells like rain out here.
I wish I was out at Chaffey
for a quick moment, enveloping
someone else in this chanel perfume
makin' someone else envious of the
way another man got to spin me out--

I'm trying to be all these people at once, an  
audience of crowd pleasers piled into one body
It's so quiet, I'm so quiet up on the sideways knoll in
Florence, tired of letting people down easy off the sidewalk
curb and being tossed off the bridge over the state highway myself,
I can't help it, I want to say aloud.

I can't help that I am this way, collected.
calm in hearty hysterics, anxious to tell
you about how I've been fixed,
that warm fear growin' hotter
a coal for every man who suggested
I be less than who I am by pourin' more
into my cup,

I'm trying. I'm trying.

Red tongues lap at the black expanse above
With such a solemn viciousness the embers dance skyward
Tiny blazing bodies fleeing to the Heavens
From molten veins through charred crusts crumbling
Dark smoke glows before the sky stumbling plumes and intricate ballet spirals
Engulfing more and more the flames and smoke
Choking the blackened skeleton dancing through the beams like bones
The body of the house
The innards reduced to dust
The scene is captured in unblinking eyes, two great fire filled suns
A sombre popping sound emits past the roaring heat static
Expensive couch, cheap cushions, hours wasted choosing
Burning and shrivelling items that they had afforded so much time
Destroyed and gone forever
Singed leaves drift from their life giver’s arms and crackle into the inferno -
High above the scorched earth
A grassless ash pile growing slowly
The blaze radiates an orange glow over the surrounding domiciles
Visible from a far, the smoke more absolute than the night sky.

Without bricks, wood, plaster, concrete
Out alone – self ejected into the world
Heavy feet dragging across the street with light steps
Creaking beams collapsing behind the way wolves bay from the trees
And from the end of the street the flames appear blood red
As if terra firma had been lashed open
Arteries of molten fire
Festering scabs of ash
Torched from under the flesh of air casting coal colour veins
Further and further the slowly diminishing frame fades
And the streets open up to dark distant sentinels
Flanking the road and watching densely and unflinching  
There are flames in the night air
History burning with a bonfire smell
Sirens wailing a crescendo of blaring blue light to meet the hellish glow

Those hands
Speak more than does the face.
They clasp or lace,
They grip or poke
Hold firm.

They open in enquiry
Or close to form a fist
Or furl and unfurl to try and give the gist
Of some internal land.

Those hands I love
Are square and brown
With rough and bitten nails.
The finger ends are blunt,
The skin is coarse
With work.
Those hands are always warm and strong
And mine in his makes me a child again.