It occurred to me today
that I like the way you died.

You died gently, the way I hoped you would,
as if the fall itself was enough.
And then I remembered that the fall itself was.

I let it draw me away
the way I knew it would,
to naked skies hollowed out,
nests for the cool indifferent air
that creeps in after dusk

And then fall crept in on you
as the violent heat we knew dissolved,
and the profuse life turned into something less alive
like the permanent muted color
of the world I now belong to.

Any kind of you and me
that ever would have been
fell,
like the leaves are doing now, I'm told.

They said they changed colors first,
like bruises blooming against the sharp, liquid sky.

And then
they  fell.

By the time they sank to the ground,
they were all dead.

The bodies will be piled
and celebrated by some before burning.

And though they won't know why,
the smell will remind them of something good.

Only those of us
who have already gone might know
that the smell carries every good day these bodies have seen

a whole season of good days,
an age,
brief as it may have been,
worth flames.

The calico-gray quilt of clouds
is no longer backlit by a sun
we won't see all season.

The naked sky of summer
reclaimed its heavy covers from storage,
the ones it needs to keep warm
even on the mildest autumn evenings.

And of all the planes I study all night,
just one lands

The rest talk over me,
struggling to reach the ceiling of this town
to pierce it and flee through the bareness behind it

The metal bird sheds ash
and demands attention in the darkness.
A lack of color trails
as it descends
across the space between the ground and the sky.

Slowly, it settles on the town
looking so much less threatening there,
like a joke even, resting on the stone heads
of the gods and goddesses in the park.

In this monotone washed out city,
The traffic moves slowly,
But still too fast to **** time,
Under a desolate ever-grey sky.

In such lack of color,
These days lose their meaning.
And laughter gives way to silence,
As bitter cold seeps in,

Through the cracked door frames and slush-speckled windows;
Through too-pale limbs and never-enough layers.
It settles only in bodies
Shuddering from more than cold air

Home among the *****-snow-lined streets,
And lonely leafless trees;
two-thousand miles from the sea.
The memory fades like melting snow.

Dead are the places that once killed time.
And lost are the ideas that enabled a hope,
That this place was ever more than a shell,
Or these bodies were more than cold.

barely able to breathe
ten feet from the stage
in awe of her hero
she sings along with a sage

"its me and the moon,
she says" her voice almost spent
showing her gratitude in decibels
"she says she wont forget"

the notes feel like needles
they stitch through her soul
they hold her together
they're mending her holes

the volume increases,
the crowd closes in.
She help from screaming
she cant stop her grin

she follows this feeling
she fits in this scene
in need of no answers
the chaos strangely serene

He sings her thoughts back
and she knows she'll survive
even as the music fades
and the crowd dissolves before her eyes

she drifts out to the buick
onto a humid june night
and as rain begins to fall
she is sure she's alive

Fury.
tears through me
like my spikes tear through the surface.
they leave tiny chunks of track-flesh
and wetness in their wake.

Burning.
again for a sensation
that wrecked me in the past.
it left me broken in two places.
Now I want it back.

Extinguished.
two years ago
on Loyola's maroon track.
a place I haven’t been since
my burning turned smokeless

Succumbing.
To the pull of something
that took me years to shake.
To the neon hurt
that creeps across my flesh

Savage.
is the strategy
that works best for me these days.
I charge the line again
as my muscles scream for air

High.
on my strides
that feel effortless again.
bounding off the curve
where we left each-other last.

the highs creep up
the temps pushing their luck
the seventh day will suffocate
or else just embrace

the rounded drops of rain
and animated wisps of clouds
become more and more sparse
as the days creep on

the air on day six
will be weighty with something
perhaps more than moisture

the unnatural grey of the sky
on a day like today
will dissolve into something better
says the seven-day, at least

with eyes still closed,
woken by rowdy students
with 8AM classes, outside not-quite-ground-floor windows
distance fills a mind

the shrinking spacial gap
creates slack in the fraying rope
that connects us at our cores

it winds in and winds back out,
like the memories of months past,
like the inside jokes and wordless exchanges,
that show up and lace through my days

distance that thrives in the cool west-coast air
and in the delicate heat of here
it grows like the vines that crawl across the canyon floor

whose pale green leaves
don't quite seem to be of this earth
after a summer spent in the midwest
where the lush green life was anything but pale

but the color has faded out
like the closeness we once knew
as if it belongs only to those distant midwest months