he offered her the universe.
                                                       ­               she said she already had her own.

the greatest gift anyone can give you is time
in a world where attention is the new currency

- what i have learned from social media

and he said "can we be friends"
                                                i didn't really know. "i have enough friends"

"well what are we then?"      
                                                the silence was deafening. then i wrote my last
                                                poem in the space standing between us
                                                "we are a bundle of photographs in an old shoe
                                                box we put at the tippy top of our closest next
                                                to our old dreams and constellations and
                                                watch it slowly gather dust. and when our
                                                children ask who our first loves were we think
                                                back quietly to the faded memories we shared
                                                and try to push each other from the brain even
                                                after all the years. and perhaps a little bit of
                                                dust gets caught in one of our eyes and we are
                                                asked "mommy are you crying" and "of course
                                                not honey" follows soon after but we both
                                                know somewhere there was an entirely
                                               different universe out there for us to share but
                                               it's okay because we will smile at our respective
                                               children and homes and spouses and you will
                                               say "of course not, it was always your mom";

perhaps all the mountains
we are carrying we were
only meant to climb

the stars and valleys
giggled to the winds at our foolishness
the mountains had been inside us the whole time

that's the problem with today's self-expression
everyone is too busy asking if theirs looks right