In school they teach you about arithmetic, but they never taught me how to divide my attention between work and play,
to add up the number of times you took my breath away or the number of times you've made me cry,
To subtract the times I've thought of you or to multiply the times I've tried to be content with that.

While listening to the radio on the bus ride home, I've realized late in my life that love is not as simple as a verse chorus verse. It takes more than one than one person to write a song, and there are more parts to a song than the lyrics

And at night I wonder if the stars shine brighter for you now that I'm gone, or maybe they sparkle just like they always did, or if there's a girl you know who knows the story of a snail who loved a sunflower too much, but slowly inched away

Hands are wonderful but fragile, used to break and to mend and to hold and to push
Mine are constantly reaching for something but my fingertips always brush against you. I never know whether to pull you close or to push you away.

In school they teach you about geography and history, but all I've learned about was the places I wanted to travel with you, of the weather, and whether we'd brace the storm together or not.
Rather than a history, I wanted to know yours: I wanted to see your future, and what it would hold for you, and whether or not I was a part of it.

I was thinking about how you were something I've unearthed, and how you were some kind of treasure that had been left hidden for a long long time, but maybe you were, in a way, like Pandora's Box with a Pharaoh's curse and I've started to avoid mirrors for quite some time afterward because I knew I would hate what was looking back at me.

In school they teach you of science, but they never taught me of how unstable we were in our individual elements and when combined we could have been perfect, except when put under pressure.
When ignited, you stole my electrons which would make you more negative and I positively unable to talk.

I didn't think I'd think about you, years from now. How much have you changed? How much have I changed?

In school they teach you of English, of grammar, and I've learned that every word in the English language cannot even define what this is that I feel for you.
You could call it love, I could call it love.
But is it 'te amo' or 'te quiero' ?

The constructs and the boundaries we place on words, on feelings, reminds me of the walls I built when you left, with each memory of you to the number of bricks I stack a ration of 1:2; one to keep you out and one to keep me in.

What's the probability of my failure in trying?
Could I move somewhere new and uncharted? Where the weather is stable? Or even unstable?
Rewrite my own history book, but without you?
Would it burn me to try again? Would the chemistry work?
School has taught me many things, but it didn't prepare me for you.

How do you explain

to your children that the

horrors of the world are real?

How will I tell my son, We

found a place you can call home but

your bus might not make it to school.

Do not look too Jewish in this part of town

Do not play in the train station

Do not get used

to the weight

of a machine gun.

Or look my

daughter in the eye and say, someday

you might say “no” and someone stronger than you might

not listen

You will not tell me

Know that this happens a lot

Know that your wrists pinned against a

backboard will

echo in the way you move your hands

for as long as you let it

But

human hands aren’t as heavy as metal shackles

And I’m so sorry

but I won’t be able to

take the weight for you

You’ll wake up in the morning

That I can promise you

You’ll wake up

and your lungs will fill with air

whether you tell them to or not.

One day

I will hold someone

small, with my face

and they’ll cry and I’ll say,

*I know.

I know you’re tied with little yarn strings to the last life

I know it hurts to be here and

(honestly)

you’re never going back

But

the older you get the less you’ll remember

what it was like

before you had a body

when you were made of ash and infinite light

You’ll convince yourself you live here and

that your hands are you,

But remember that once you were boundless

Inside my body, without yours.

I scold myself repeatedly
Why didn't my heart consult my mind before falling for him?
Why did it bypass my logic?
How did I love so easily?
So quickly?
So strongly?
The strength I knew not until he examined my love
Toyed with it
Pushed the boundaries
Exhumed it
That he ripped open to study
Wondering all the while if I was worthy
He shook his head and passed back my love
No, its not what I thought
He said
No, its not what I want
He said
I blinked with disbelief and stared at what he had returned
He'd destroyed
Picked apart
No, I cried out as he turned to leave
Leaving me holding my heart which he'd massacred
This isn't what I gave you I stuttered
I offered my heart renewed by your essence
Plump, glowing and infinite
Full of love and hope
Of endless possibilities
You've given me back a wreck
A shell of what was
How was it still able to be be radiating such love?
Such intense raw adoration?
I pray for it to begin to lessen
I pray, I pray, I pray
Seemingly to no avail

11/13/12*
I don't know what I would do if I lost her
I think I would start by retracing the steps she took to find herself
Get to revisit all the places that she's visited to build her character
Find myself in each place she found her calling
Calling back memories to the rims of her eyes
I want to see all the places she's seen
And try to outline them with my corneas
And dilate her thoughts with my pupils
Try to recollect every tear that was fallen and for what reason
In her palms, I want to find my self in the things she found in her palms
What psalms she grazed with her fingertips
Find out what fire sparked sparks in between her snapping fingertips
That tipped her closer to insanity
Find out who she found herself in hands held, but hearts closer than her fingertips
That tipped her closer to be sane
All to the first hand she ever held
Her mother’s.
If I ever lost her, I would find her mother.
And thank her for also giving me a life
Ask her what it feels like to have a daughter that’s the barren of
Laughter, sanctuary, and comfort.
Ask her what it feels like to have a daughter
Whose made so many connections
That brings strangers together with just her smile
Thank her mother for building a home for me too,
*** I never asked her too.
“I found myself in you.”
If I ever lost her…
I would lastly lose myself in her poetry.
Bury myself six feet deep in her journals
And cover myself with her words
Decipher her metaphors line by line
Be engulfed in her personifications
Allude myself to her smiles
Become caved in her hyperboles
And pump my veins with the ink she used to flood pages
I want to lose myself in her notebooks and become stranded in her
Poetry.
Her poetry is something to remember
To be retraced to find again and again.
If I ever lost her, I would find her again and again
In her poetry

Ideas are darkened figures,
built upon pigments and ideas.
They can whip through gallery doors,
the canteen,
across mezzanine floors.

Ideas are hotel love affairs,
with their take away trays;
they’ll check up on you
every once in awhile,
with a phone call diverted from
the Hotel Lobby’s, binary file.

Ideas are those ghosts of girls,
pale skinned beauties that’ll pass you
in the street,
only to unfurl at the feet
of some other man
as a fireside treat.

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.

I first fell in love on a ferris wheel
in the brisk cool breeze,
A cinematic night that felt so surreal
a lover's flying trapeze.
And when we fell, we fell forever
entwined with each other,
Onto the sandy beach whispering
"You'll always be my lover."
I felt your touch before I saw you
embracing all of me,
And now I found what I always knew
a place where I can breathe.
With the years that have passed us by
I know that I still feel,
The same I did that night with you
found love on a ferris wheel.