you saw her draped in scarves
so bold,
flapping around her supple figure,
you got glances in-between
of velvet skin,
soft freckles
flitting,
a bird of paradise
is what she is.
exotic
and
free
but you saw her hips
sway
and you thought of closing
your hands
over bone;
of pulling her down
underneath
your groin.
not
a
person at all
she seemed
to you
but
a body
meant to pleasure you.

Ever had a teardrop fall out of nowhere?
Like you aren't sad or anything; it's just...

It's almost like
Someone you lived as
In a past life
Still reeling over heartbreak
Or a dredging loss
Breaks thru for a
second.

You will not leave me.

This isn't a statement of confidence.
Believe me when I say my faith in you,
Wavers every day.
When I say you will not leave me,
This is what I mean-

Twice a day you will look at the time and wish you hadn't.

Wood chips will now be more than splinters to you.

Station wagons will drive not only to places real, but they will drive you insane.

Record stores will be graveyards, hosting tombstone after tombstone of vinyl records.

You will not leave me, because even if you do, I will not leave you.

I am a tree
Whose roots have smuggled their way into the sediments of your life.
I have grown too tall for you to up-root me now.

And her presence will not
Fill the voids left by me;
I am not dirt, meant to
Fill the holes you dig.
We are puzzle pieces
and we fit where
We belong and

She does not belong in
the same space as I do.

If you leave,
I will not want you back.
If you leave
I would want you to
let me be to deal
with my own doings please.

I have loved you
Even as you left me.
I have stayed
I have watched
You, drift to and from me
Like the sea to the shore.
My involvement with
You, has been relentless.

What you don't realize is that
I have loved you with a rigor
Thicker than my head.
But

You will not leave me, because even if you do, I will not leave you.

When my mind is feeling
like it's floating underneath a painted ceiling
and the windows crack
to take me back
into another
dream
and the ceiling's just a scene that's crayoned on a bathroom door
but the beauty of the dream is that it shows me so much more
than I would know
that's where I go.

When the hallway drifts into a serene sea
I'll be
there.
In the shaking waking hours of dawn before I'm born again
when the night becomes some distant fix upon an orbital
I absorb it all
and put it in a cardboard case.
In case I want to look again into that other realm
that overwhelms my senses
and makes less sense to me
every time my mind floats free
underneath a painted
ceiling.

we're just a tangle of limbs,
skin and teeth
sinking our fangs
in whatever
escape we can get our hands on
******* all the experience
of drug dazed lust
and nights veiled in smoky dust,
car windows broken open,
the glass embedding into
our dreams
a mosaic of the world opening up,
sliding down it's throat
as the wind whispers secrets into our hair
and we flick the ashes of cigarettes
over and over
awkwardly holding them between fingers,
pretending to know how to smoke
professionally
all the innocent pretend to be *****
until one day it's just there
the shirt fits
and you forget
how to skip backwards,
chalk staining knee caps
we're done
quite done.