I, too, can write passion poems:

(and if you were a rose I'd pick you and stick you
in water till you withered and died and
everyone would comment
on your color
and refined shape.)

so let's collide with night through our noses:
wake to your banging fist on my swinging door
and binge on bad ideas and beatless songs
till distended with poetry we grow ill and collectively
**** sunsets onto those 365 well-ruled pages
        that we pray to in pews in this church of hedonists--
        every book a bible, all manuals for *******.

so at dawn we
criticize the sunrise, hang ourselves
from the belltower, for kicks.
or lash limbs together under covers,
those well-rehearsed kisses
a myriad of plots:

and with our bony fingers,
tie the sumblimest of knots.

"I need to make more art"
I say today. But not tomorrow,
tomorrow I am heading west, again,
into a new notebook I've titled, "Chapter 3"

And my friends, the poets
weight a web from their pupils, to their hangedman's shame
but I will just tell you about my morning:
the coffees I sipped, the hours clocked.
I scraped the edges from my fingernails
with the tip of my traveling knife.

Last night I shared a cigarette on the fire escape,
while Rachel cried about her leaving friend.
Looking at the sky, trying to conjure a feeling of insignificance.
But all I could feel was mighty...

(musing that, like topiary,
perhaps one day I'll not have nails at all.)

I close my eyes
Try to sleep
I see a wave of ink
A cloud of black
In water
No rhyme
No poem or verse
I'm going blind
I need a nurse
******* like cumuli
Hips as wide as a nautical mile
To get me back to sea
To help me see
To make me smile.

r ~ 5/26/14

I do not wish to dream,
For dreams are illusionary life,
Peopled with phantoms of the living
Reflecting our awakened mind's
Fears, lusts, hopes.
Vanity flavours the subconscious.

There is no rest here.

When I close my eyes I pray for darkness.
I wish to escape into the black,
Silk tendrils of the lost tickle my fancy,
Easing my ever chattering mind
Into micro deaths of sweet silence.
I do not exist,
Neither do you,
Nothing.
It is here that I find comfort.

Solace in the forgetting.

I'd never cared for flowers
Symbols of affection that wilt
And forget memories
And fall apart in kitchens and bedrooms and strew their pieces on the floors
Dried and broken after only days of being lovely
Flowers with their alternating patterns of
Unreliable determinations
Claiming every other petal as an opposite declaration
Of a determination
Of love
And I never liked removing thorns from roses
Because they added something truthful and
Poetic

But when you gave me flowers
I held them to my heart and let my eyes dance across the kaleidoscope that they created in a glass vase
I let them live for longer than they did
Because they were still pretty even when no one else seemed to think so
And when they hang dried on a wall
Still colorful but slightly brittle
Maybe they'll stay like that if I just don't touch them
When you gave me flowers
I plucked off every other petal
Into a bouquet of He-Loves-Me
Because for once there was no doubt
For once I believed the sentiment in the flowers and the words from your lips as you handed them over
The lack of nots in the petals
Pulling apart the knots in my stomach
He loves me
He loves me
Truer than the dirt that holds
Wilting symbols of affection
Sweeter than the honey
Of their pollinators
He loves me
He loves me
A garden of something new and beautiful
Perennial and built on symbolism after all

Until you let me know that dead flowers were just dead flowers
That they were past their worth
And metaphors aren't worth the dirt they were grown in
That perennials can't return
When you've salted the soil
And brittle flowers on the wall should always be removed
But I always lived in metaphors anyway
And I had a new appreciation for flowers that I didn't want to lose
I was no longer a rose
But a thorn
I always thought smooth stems were so boring
Not to mention dishonest
But I didn't want to make you bleed
So painfully I dug an olive branch from my rib cage
Then realizing that a ****** token may not be so well received
I decorated it with a bouquet of blue Forget-Me-Nots
But you plucked off every other petal
And handed back an array of He-Loves-Me-Nots
He loves me not
And there was no doubt in the sentiment
The sentience of metaphors dying all around me
When all I know is metaphors
And flowers were never just flowers
And words were never just words
But both are found on gravestones and poems and apologies
And parallels have fallen into nice and even spacing
Reducing flowers to clichés
Of alternating promises
Of He loves me and
He loves me not
Of broken promises
He loves me
Not

words of a restless soul
flow from gift of desperation
reaching out to infinite God
separated by space and time
united by all embracing *love

Thinking back on that day
so long ago, I always have to ask myself
if my recollection is true.

Did the sunlight and the spray from the falls
really create a rainbowed halo above you?
And did the trout all rise to the surface
at one time just to feed on your beauty?

On even the coldest days the memory
still never fails to warm my heart.
Funny how tomorrow I might smile
thinking of that day so long ago,
and the next shed tears abundant as the falls
that in concert with the sun
sang you forever into my heart.

r ~ 4/4/14

Somedays, the tide only laughs
at the sandbags we put up.
When the ocean of emotion
breaks with waves above our hearts,
we swim or drown.

The swell of current overrides
and riptides pull us down.
Move parallel to shore against the tide
till firmer ground is found.
Swim.

r ~ 4/6/14