Bare skeletons cast their shadows
from your temporary closets, and bruise
your casual grins with their bleached-bone fists.
You left
here this morning with a carry-on
just to find three bags checked in your name.


Someday your luggage will know
continents, leaving trails
of letters, love songs and photographs.
You will not see these places,
these ancient beauties,
like she did, through the dust
of your travels
beaten grey from army green foot lockers.


Little white tags crumble dates
and loneliness into your sheets.
Your smiles come slower; your tendons ache
in their restless sleeps.
The years of calloused fingers
fumbling latches in the dark
leave your nails jagged
and ******.


But you carry her voice in your suitcase always
knowing her weight would sink into your bones.

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who live briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

Meet me in
the park at
the edge
of the world.

After dark
when the Coyotes
and Feral Cats
rule.

Bring us a
bottle
and I'll
bring something
to smoke on.

We'll use it
all and talk about
nothing.

We'll quietly
wonder beneath
the silent,
blameless
night time sky.

And we'll
both do our
best
to forget
this week
that was..

Somewhere in the furrows of pink and gray
flesh, nestled between delicate arches of pelvis,
in what was supposed to be bowels and pulsating warmth,
lies the wish for chemotherapy.

Old images of skull-white sundresses
glimmering with the glory of summer days in the world of Perfect Thighs
fester imperceptibly,
buried in some remote corner of the midbrain
that smells like half-digested chicken parmesan;

each memory’s tastefully arranged––
rows of wheat, sharp as disinfectant,
sour with antimetabolites and metastatic guilt.
October levels prospects like a hurricane,
and as your mother balances a salad fork between chalk fingers
the full plate in front of you reminds you of ruptured organs.