No need
for valentines

She wears
men's hearts
like pendants

Under bruised skies
in late July
she hoarded electric life
in blue Ball jars

Dandelion dust
twitched across her face
as time
inevitably would

as the dead end road
reached its limit
we stopped
the snow
stretching behind us
from one ditch
to the other
seemingly smoking
as it skimmed the asphalt

sirens broke our silence
while we gawked
at the long-standing
blemish
among successful fields
years of neglect
now drifting away
in tufts of black smoke

our faces reflected
its tremendous glow
and he watched
my heart sink
reassuring me
that those fields
would churn out rusty nails
for the next
fifty years

Out here,
poem is a ***** word
covered in silt
kicked up from the fields
caught in the breeze
they 'cling, cling, cling'
through dangling wind chimes
of rusty silverware
drifting away
like unwelcome guests

She whispered stars
into the evening
through strands of brown
that made up my world

My tiny eyelids fell
before paperback memories
of the little boy
dancing in watercolor

As her gentle curves abandoned,
I finally awoke

The boy,
   not really a prince

And she,
   my porcelain moon

Sometimes
beneath her words
subtle strokes
of ivory are heard

But she can't sing
just flails about
in murky puddles

*no galoshes

Freed*
from the isolation
of inadequate words,
she felt herself vanishing
like the ghosts
in her womb

I could see him thinking
at the top of his lungs
as desolation seeped
from the wounds
in my belly

Murky water revealed
the shadows we’d tried to escape
while giant mayflies
struck
our bitter, fragile limbs

Dry, brittle branches ?
Black as death ?
Disrupting the smoothness ?
Of the oh-so pale blue sky ?
Your determination is ugly ?
When compared ?
To the myriad colors ?
You left on the ground ?
But this reminds me ?
My favorite tree
That Old Man Winter ?
Never wins

Just as much
as that black and white day
when her delicate hands
carried baby's breath
he finds himself
adrift in her eyes
still pleading
with
the clocks