She carries her heart like paper
Creased in folds unseen
and unread in paragraphs unwritten
Her poem is scattered and misunderstood
Words crawl back into words
Desire pierces through the veils of her desires
Tasting what is real seems a pointless walk
Through what is and what is not
Her truths are scribbled in the margins
At night she
Tucks them into the cracks of her soul

She carries her heart like paper
All the while knowing that
It could burst into flames at any given moment
Any given kiss, any given touch,
any given word or any given glance
She only pretends that life is not so fragile
But she knows that the fragility is what binds us all together
It is written there somewhere in the preamble
That someone read aloud before she was born
It is the subtext in all her poems



She carries her heart like paper
As she breathes heavy in white mist mornings
The most alive as she can be
It is silent as she walks through herself
Peering through her heart
She bleeds her water in the rain
It washes through the fabric
Of her beginning
Leaving her soul fresh and unwritten
Individuated from any god she could create
She blends into the fog

I trespass again, into that sanctum that harbors everything we are
Yet we can’t know what we are
So the rooms and hallways are only a softly lit maze
Where tender and dreams and resolve and fear and breaths and sleep and pain
All rest in undefined spaces

I sit under a large tree, not knowing the species
The park is quiet and the bench is cold
A girl passes, strangely intent on her direction
As if she is pushing forward as much as she is push something away behind her
Her lips, a bright shade of red
The way it reflects in her face
Suggests
She is always wearing that shade of lipstick
She has always had bright red lips
And what corridor led her to that constitution
Where does she keep herself
Do her rooms look anything like mine
And how could we ever know

On the phone last night L sounded lonely
It was in the way she let her guard down between words
Whether either or both of us wanted it to be over
I knew we no longer knew
We speak too often
And fourteen years has its own constitution
Its own balance sheet and its own life
There is a room where the two of us will always exist
Just as there is one for my father
And my mother
And that beggar child in Guatemala
So many rooms

I laid my phone on my chest after we finished talking
And felt its weight hold down my breath
I wanted to sink into the earth
And disappear into the strata below
Wishing I could crawl into spaces that exist in between
A part of life I cannot live


The girl with the red lips comes walking back
Her pace is exactly the same
Is she looking for that room that harbors her relief
Her freedom, her future
I am relieved that she has not noticed me
“We” do not exist
Nothing of us has been exchanged
She is only a part of a poem
A canvas that I can sketch out a view of a landscape
That we crawl over
Day after day
So many rooms

This winter is waiting
The old limb sways in a rhythm with the memories
I wander through
The storms I weathered within my heart
Burn the calluses into fleshes forgotten
The winds is whispering wisdoms
With the breath of my soul
We exhale what love could never have been

This winter is waiting
I would weep a song that brought flowers
To all those I have loved
The dust in my heart and the dust in my soul
Lay in a repose…. the strata lines are made of the pains  
For all the things that slipped between the cracks in my heart
Some winds drown out the songs that echo within
But I suffice knowing that they are there….

He came there to **** him
The setting sun made the scene tranquil
Bathed in light unguarded
We were festive… and simple

The shots rang out
The shots tore into his chest
The shots tore through the village, through the hearts of all who knew him
The shots tore away what we were

The rain has washed away the blood
But can the rain drown out his wife’s mournful cries
Can the rain fall through us
Can the rain wash away what we are now