I wore your long ratty red tank
all night
then the next day
then that night
and then I had to go back to
my buttoned up bereavement
my starched sadness
my dry cleaned darkness
I had to go back to it all

but at 5 o'clock precisely
I put that red racer back
back on
my brick bearing
back

During weeping grief
Clothes wear me
they sag heavy over bones
Cotton is cloth owner
over core
Concealing ribs
that, during loss, are useless
They merely cage a shattered vessel

During lengthy anguish
Food consumes me
Water sips me up
Sleep abandons me
Oxygen breaths me
Until all that is left
is an exhale
Lungs and life deflated

Dear loved ones are gone. Some of them still on earth
and some of them raining sweetly in my dreams

You are visiting OUR friends
Only YOUR friends now
They met each other through US
And I met  YOU through HIM
they just adopted a baby boy named Finn
and as you cradle babe
I spend twenty minutes steaming a dress I'm going to shove into a suitcase
and the bags under my eyes
could hold enough dresses to last me the rest of summer
Last week I taught myself
how to stop from flinching
at your ghost
Swallow the lumps you shove down my throat
wash it down with whiskey
My therapist called me last night
She said "it was out of protocol"
"I don't want to be invasive because enough people in your life already are."
Do I think I'll end up with a man?
I don't know
I don't feel anything anymore
I turned myself into you
thinking only with stagnant organs
only breathing with logic
only giving a **** when I feel like it
Only grabbing and gutting
only hunting and harboring
my soul
my vessel
my streamline sailboat
a river of loneliness
man-made and full of fish to ****
I am a salmon's skeleton

It is a crawling
a snake of emotional creeping
an ache of mishaps
pushing up, seeking an opening
a release of pressure
a leaking gasket of **** ups
a painful agony of woes
it is zap of intestinal torment
it is numb lips
a haunting light
all of it leading and glowing into the
being
the being I keep avoiding.
the feeling I keep translating into metaphors
and unoriginal analogies
I keep trying to define it
like I can touch any of this
thought bubbles float above us
To think I could grasp any of it
I reach anyways
Separating immediately when I'm clutching air
holding hands with an empty ancient lover
I disassociate from pain
trying to beat her at her own game
I try and cut off limbs that steal from
my bliss
but they remain phantom
floating around and mocking
all that is left of me.

Your body is nectar
It shifts and shakes me
Into a yellow and black beauty
I grow wings
But I wouldn't dare to use them
I keep them tucked behind blades
And **** up the honey
That I rinse out of you
I become a fiend
My habit is your hands
I crave **** and ****** and
Collar bone
Your pores are pebbles
My ache comes in currents
And soon I am sinking into your soft sands
Your lips are morning dew
That still drip with dusk
I become every hour of the day
And I'll peer into your kaleidoscope way
with wreck less abandon
For as long as you will let me.

When it first happened
Everything in sight
Taller than I
Seduced me
Urged me
To flee the earth

Western red cedar
Sooty brick chimneys
Rainier caps
You.

I could climb and clutter and choke and caress and cling
Oh to have a moment of solitude
With the blue
If I was vertical enough
Would the fever fade?

I could mutate into molecule
A drift of snow
An aphid eaten leaf
A maroon berry
Caught in a sparrow's beak
Would I be alleviated by elevation?
If I get close enough to God would I be washed of my sins?
I vow never to touch soil again
Tree limbs would be my salvation

Meet me there.

I dug up the roots of my front yard Hawthorne
And squeezed tears out of ducts
To water soil
To nurture limbs
To bare berry
That round maroon flesh
Plucked by sparrow
Then **** out on your freshly waxed Subaru
I hope you are out of town when it happens
And it dries and crusts and mutates
And you have to scrub
And sweat
Right back into the ****
That was fostered by my sadness