Do not love her.

Love her.

Shake the world with your feet,

cup butterflies in your hands,

let them go.

I was young when my bike went flying without me down a hill and I,

so cleverly, pulled my body to the side and flew off into the grass of a

neighbor’s yard

and fetched the bike soon after.

I think I know how to jump ship.

I think I don’t know how to say “no” too well.

I think you found me,

though I am hiding, deep in a body, in a person.

I am like cancer, riddled and bone wasted and envious and intruding.

I am like the dove.

You capture me to let me go.

Wear the sweater.

Unravel it as you walk, write your secrets on the threads, let them trail behind you

leave your life in a one-line riddle,

the answer only being

“it was you.

it was you.”

Let it go.

Do not follow your way back to the beginning,

to the genesis of that *******,

to the start.

Let it go.

Your nails grow too fast.

You cut yourself with them,

find bruises on your body.

How pleasant,

reminders of how the body lives its own life,

regardless of you,

without.

Without you I am fetal.

Without you I am hunched, old.

Within you I am a haloed angel,

soul carrying soul carrying soul.

a week has passed
and I am so sure of the
  uncertainty.
A boy    desperate   and me
hopeless,    Plan B.
In more than one way,
I have lost myself
so many times.
She tells me I am not the same
person, that I am withering,
disappearing.
I do not disagree, only tell her
that I am   trying.

Stinkbug, caught in a shriveled
spider's web.
Stinkbug falls, saves itself.

Only it knows how this could have
ended.
Only I know how this shouldn't
end, how it shouldn't
even be the way it is, in the
first place.
The habit of sleeping five hours past my alarm,
the dull roar of my dreams.

You have not tried to save me;
I am not asking you to.

I say it is up to me.
How everything is up to me,
my willingness to stay entrapped,
     engrossed in the web of something
within me, beyond me.

If I am the stinkbug, it is time. If I am the
stinkbug,
it is time.

Death lands on my fingertips,
asks if I want
to coddle it, if I want
to cup it and hold it close,
raise it, share a bed with it.

I am not sure what I've asked for,
if this was planned, if I was
a spiderweb to entrap
a sea to let you swim in.

A yellow jacket sings on the table
floats toward the color.

Do I, too, float towards the color?
Am I the spider, the web, the
     bug, stuck?

Shrapnel stings like the yellow jackets
like the wasp in my thigh.
Shrapnel that might never let go.

When we threw the pumpkins out,
old rotting
     mold gourds
we let them sink into the ground.
We forgot.

The next year, vines shot out
pumpkins shouted out
and we could never forget again.

They come every year,
along with the burning of leaves
and the blindness of a dog
who sees less
and less.

I wonder about forgetting.
I worry about forgetting.
My memory is being tossed like
seeds to the wind,
I'm hoping the planting and the sowing will birth
what I have forgotten.
The intention was invisible,
the darkness was audible.

I'm sorry to myself.
I've forgotten everything else.

When you wake up in the morning,

you crack all the bones in your body that you can.

You are not sure if this is a reminder of aliveness

in the way that old houses are revived when steps fall on creaky floorboards.

You write poems about yourself,

convinced that they will save you.

They will.

Cigarette, shower, breathe easy.

Deep and slow, like the coming of winter, like the ticking of a grandfather clock.

Remember that you had one,

and you left it behind.

Remember there are so many other things like this.

When you wake up in the morning,

so often you have to remind yourself

that today is a day worth living,

even if it is storming,

even if the clouds haven’t moved for days

or weeks

or years.

Today is a day worth living because there are so many things you have

yet to do,

like walk outside

or dream yourself a kite.

It is pouring rain now.

This, too, is another reason to stay alive.

Watch the drunken beauty of the overflowing earth

wait for you to join it

a long, long time from now.

I guess the leaves are on the lawn now,

like Fall always comes and thank God for October

but too many grandparents have died this month, and

on the first day, the rain keeps

coming.

And I have been

obliterated by simple things,

like October or

the coming and going of people.

I have been

shocked silent into this room,

I am still never

sure of what left there is to say;

there are too many people that I have left with semicolons

and no following independent clauses

or independent thought.

Shake me the most awake,

or I will blanch and putter and

scream in the morning.

How nightmares upon nightmares

upon daymares

have thrown me for something—

a loop maybe? A figure-eight?

———

I have always

wondered why we collect shells on the beach.

(I know I do it too, but)

they once held life

and I am wondering why we celebrate

the shell of things.

———

I am not sure how to end this,

but in the ever so common way of ending

without really an ending at all.