he asked me what my favourite poem was
and I said I couldn't pick just one,
but that I really liked The Waste Land,
and he said "why, when no one really
understands it?" and I told him,
"that's what I like about it",
and it's because in all of its chaos
it makes so much more sense
than a sonnet, than anything
from Spenser or Shakespeare,
it makes sense because the only way
to write life is to stuff 400 lines
full of subtext and allusions
until your head is spinning.
I told him that Eliot created
a waste land with letters
and maybe that's the only way
to write anything,
and he nodded as if he agreed
or at least understood
but said that he preferred Yeats
to Eliot and Neruda to Yeats
because life was enough
of a mess without the modernists.

i feel like a bad person
when your eyes turn
into reflections of the sea
and i know that it's because of me.

oh, I'm not
the greatest poet,
but I'm a poem
in my own right --
an artwork,
the sunset.
I can dress like summer
and talk
like shooting stars,
I can help you drown
or save you,
soothe
your fast-beating heart
with Irish songs
and get you drunk
on love
or wine.
perhaps you should
write me down
on post-it notes
that you leave
on the refrigerator door.
perhaps you should
love me forever.
I wrote you, too,
the best I could --
but my writing never was
much good.
I am not an artist.
I'm a work of art.
perhaps you should
put me in photo frames
that you put on your desk
and your bedside table, so
you'll never forget me.
perhaps you should
paint me
in fields of yellow roses.
perhaps you should
never let go.

there's something scratchy in my throat. behind my tongue. between my lips. it's ever-present, ever-changing, ever-clawing to be set free. it sits solemnly as i wake, stretching its own claws as i wind up, holding out for the moment i realize that i am conscious. once again. for another day. holding out for the moment i'm smiling, thinking this will be a better day. then it howls. scratches up, up, up. itches my tongue. pounds against my teeth, slithers between my lips, hisses. **maybe not.

He opened doors to both Heaven and hell
but contradicting conflict is preferable to the purgatory of false confidence.

I numbed my soul with constructions and sudden reality is jarring.
Nobody likes being cut cold turkey
but the way he wipes my tears and touches his lips to mine makes the withdrawal infinitely better than intoxicating fantasies of escape.

                          *-lf-

i feel like the
world is both
too big and
too small

i am being
swallowed whole,
but i have no
place to run,
nowhere to go

and the morning was dripping
landing in fragments
not quite a quiet hurricane.
she was more mist than anything
and nostalgia has you in its grip,
running its soft lullabies across your neck
the goosebumps telling a story no one ever
knew.
now you hang open in your past
and your skin becomes the rain streaked
window pane
soaking through
the living room curtains.