My first poem was about you.
I bet you can't remember. You promised me you'd come visit me that summer.
Because you missed me.
I was about about five years old. At that age I still believed in promises.
You never came.
In fact, I never saw you after that.

I saw fathers around me.
Carrying their children on their shoulders.
Mom couldn't, she's not that strong.
I saw them, kissing mothers, with their children in the middle.
I kiss my mother. She needs it.

Once, in class, I wrote your name in my notebook.
With the words 'I miss my dad'
Got detention for messing up my homework.

I think about you dying. And I wonder what I'd feel.
I hope your ghost will also never keep his promises.

my body a home best lived in.
babe, my  body is a home best lived in.
worn and weathered,
it sways,
dancing in the wind storms,
bowing at snow flakes that pile on,
I shudder, I moan,
like me this house is living,
it breathes hot air in the summer months,
takes purchase of the rain,
it takes whats given,
you mend,
I leak,
I shatter,
my boards squeak, protesting your arrival,
but you aren't put off by the walls i raise,
you fix my windows wipe the mist that streams,
you serenade me with your sorrows,
you lament I cave,
you know my crooks,
youve etched the crannies,
you drop the glass,
you carve out space,
you box up my insides,
making it a more convient display,
Is that what this is? Is that what Ive become?
A convenience store home,
in which you hope to barter,
with a smile or a touch with a slip of kindness,
an I.O.U. of commercialized grace,
If my love was a stream, you'd bottle it up and send it to another factory to be, another product,
of a good conquest,
I'm just another good conquest,
what have you gained?
o my... what have I lost?
what do I have left of me?
have you seen my broken pieces?

i love the sea because
she is honest.
when she is angry,
she's wild:
waves of emotion carelessly tossing
boats and sailors around as
a warning not to mess with her.
but when it's quiet
and everything is still,
she is so calm and
so beautiful that
it's hard not to fall in love
with the sound of her waves
gingerly kissing the shore.

in a way, i consider you
to be my own personal sea.
you pull people into you,
only to push them away and
you have so much depth that
nobody has ever really seen.
but i have dived down deep enough
to learn that you cry during
most disney movies and that you
like the smell of my perfume and
it's hard not to fall in love
with the way your lips feel
against mine.

"I bet your lips are soft."

Mm.

And there goes everything I've ever known.

How do I let you back into my life

When you slammed
the door
in my face
and only opened it
when you got lonely.
Saw me dead on
the doorstep.


How do I let you back into my life

When the title
of this poem
is the title of the song
that I spent years
wasting time
on loving you
like you never
spent
on me.

And I let you in
And I let you in, again.

She rides the chanting waves
At the seas horizon,
In fires of star sheen and moon shine,
Sweet Niamh of the golden hair, and aqua eyes,

Princess of the green sea turtles,
Of the coral sea grottos,
Anemone naves and kelpie skins,
Trailing the rainbow schools of the whirling fin,

The whole twining ocean globe of blue is swooning
Under the milky waving skies and unfathoming deeps,
Her laughter lighting the unremembered bottom of the seas.

Birds will sing, but I don't really feel a thing.

who?
what?
I,
thats who.
who's asking anyway?
Was it that ratchet **
frahm the deli?
*** I got something to say to her, And I will say it
sometimes she puts my chicken on rye
on ciabatta.
And sometimes it's fine because...
sometimes I see the moon then soon I see the sun, sometimes I like to look out of the highest floor
and everything is so small and so peaceful:
no one can upset that tranquility,
the sheer exhaustion of life,
gives one a tough exterior, a shell.
If someone comes a knocking, before i've had my pie, it's all over,
but sometimes realizing you are but an ant...is refreshing
then you get back downstairs and someone spills their grande americano, no milk or sugar, because that's so  mainstream on your cashmere cardigan
then you realize
that throwing a punch is so very healthy
a punch straight in the retro glasses that they do not need.
pow, right in the kisser.
So you can tell the nashty from the deli
she might be next.
The man who spilled his drink is now on the ground, but it's ok he instgrammed the whole thing.