The sensation of
Your hand in mine makes me feel
Like it is all right.

The poet lives two lives.
One on the outside,
And one in their mind.

When you look in their eyes
You could see an abyss.

If you looked long enough
You could sink into it.

But most people don’t see it.

Take the time to read the words, though,
And you would know for sure.

The poet lives in two different worlds.

I felt it crumbling
I felt it falling with the rain
The invisible
I felt it falling
Bits and pieces
Shreds and ribbons
The clothing of my wings
As God unpacked the wraps with haste
Like a restless child
Tearing down the gift
Together with the wrapping

I felt it falling
Scorching on the skin
Of frail reveries
Soaking wet I felt the taste
Of gasoline
And drowned the rain
Into my eyelids

Yearning always led me
to project my vision onto you,
was a chanting fidelity,
was faith’s hymn through long nights.
Yearning made me fall for you.

Days pass, and adoration swells.
I set my bags at your door
and said goodbye to travel and trouble,
set down all my sins,
forgave their world and its people.

Yearning taught me how to survive
and how to heed the inside.
Now my eyes long light.
Even as yearning made me suffer love,
I still burn deep down.

We promised things, and now we’re strangers.
Love, I have nothing left, but I still believe
in promises. If we are to be no more, know,
know, that I am the one
whose love is beyond this vision.

You are lamenting love that left one day
for the world of the impossible.

It was a dream, but is there anything
except illusion and make-believe anyway?

Our life is a summer cloud’s thick shade.

You lament love’s autumn folds,
and the division of all we shared.

Who said anything lasts?  Hopes melt
and a sole question remains: Why enter my life

if dreams only turn to sand,
heat-haze blurring into heat-haze?

I carried all I had through the tangled night, blaming the road
that spurred me backward to green windows, witness

to the hunger of our bodies, witness to the underside
of forever. Alone now in the road’s slow night,

I re-sense the first days’ blush, the flash
of your hand in mine: how do you bear all that is past?

Such bluff inside my boast: I will forget you.
I try to move on, but a shadow slides along, chiding that folly.

Beside the road, pale light seeps into yellow tulips,
and I quicken for what is lost: youth, freedom, dreams.

Aimless, I stare at the ground until dizziness takes me.
Somewhere in the dust of these empty streets where we began:

the warmth of our hands. Somewhere in this dust
our savoring footsteps, somewhere my roving tears.

Like the endless road, my story is here and there at once.
Can I resist the was that beckons? Shall I continue alone?

As your memory strums the chord in my chest,
the threads of my journey unravel, unravel.