Baby, I'm lonely tonight
She sang softly into the microphone
A room full of people
and I know she was alone
She never did live in anyone else's world
But I remember her living in mine
All those years ago
Lying naked under giggling covers
Watching her day dream with night eyes
Closed up tight
Listening as she always was
Her reality
In wake and dream
Whirls of color
Shades of mist
She's added a few wrinkles
And a few grey hairs
But she hasn't aged a day

He seems obvious to the note passing,
To the eyes spying and the paper ***** flying.
He sits at his desk with a meek expression upon his face,
Not quite staring into space, but a place.
I can tell by this clean features and his put-together attire,
That he acquires to be in a position higher with such desire.
That he's dreaming of a place that doesn't require baby-sitting hormonally deranged teenagers,
It's a place where maybe he's a manager or somewhere fighting potential danger,
The bell rings above his head which shakes him back to the present time,
He adjusts his jacket and looks around like he committed a crime, then he smiles goodbye to his students like they were piles of grime.
I creep up to his desk and tell him,
It's not that grim, remember, the glass is full to the brim.

It was in the way your chest
concaved, convexed with my pulse
and with our ******; our bodies

beat rhythms into the walls
and floors; I was shaking
as your hand held up the arch

of my back. I looked up and wished
it wasn’t you so badly, I cried
and you wiped away what you saw

to be a bead of sweat from my cheek.
It was January and the heater
was broken.

I long for what I’ve never known: a word
that captures the foreign feels of speech surging
from my throat, the ways they shake and crack with
fury and failure as I break away
from the safety of silence, in jagged
and fragmented sentences–I’m desperate
to seize meaning, trying words like puzzle
pieces, I’ll force them to fit together
to form the spaces of pieces missing.
My greatest fear is to be incomplete.

And I’m constantly reminded of this
over coffee-talk and shared politics
as I recoil shyly in forced defense
of each vowel, and every consonant
and the myriad of their constructions:
they are stuck behind my eyes. I am left
apologizing for my vagueness and
for the grey shades of embarrassment and
finite language–when a dictionary
is never a long enough read for the
lone, longer walk around the circumference
of my head–or any red eye flight I have
ever caught that takes me from thought to thought:

the moving belts of baggage claim don’t
have to tell me of the luggage I lost.
As possessions were plucked from circuitry
I clung to the emptiness as if it
was mine and took it home as leverage.
I write in circles ’til I’m motion sick.
I write myself into thought-asylums
where silence is another language:
a slow germination of roots lacing
down the bell-curve of my spine.
A foreign tongue, An othered alphabet.

she despises december through march
the arch of endless grey
when her body fades to snow, and
the dreaded holidays
come in perpetual flow
unshed rivers, ****** behind
those tired eyes
her velvet voice is rarely heard
truly,
weeks go by without a word
all year she fears
that day of months
afraid this time
she
     will
            dis
                 a
                       ppe

                                  a



            
                                                        r

I like the way you smoke your cigarettes.
And how your forehead tenses when you think.
I like the way you hold my hand.
How you tell me stories.

I can never get enough of you.

I wish I could draw back the curtains,
peer just behind your eyeballs, to the brain.
Sit for awhile in your beating heart.
Kiss your lungs and beg them to breathe forever.

Tell me a story, just one more story.

I'd miss the way you smile at me,
just after you know you've made me laugh.
I'd miss the way we sleep together, the
way we lay intertwined.

I'll close my eyes, and pray I never lose you.