Dear Shyla
I keep the suicide note that you've forgotten you wrote our mother folded up in a small wooden box in the corner of my bedroom
It's there so that on my worst days
When I've run out of friends who will listen
I can remind myself that other people feel this too
And after all we've been through apart sometimes our depressions and our mistakes are the only way I can remember we're related

Dear mom
I've hidden a diary you kept while struggling through your ill-fated relationship with my father
In it there are weight loss goals
Vows of marital celibacy
Existential questions
But mostly just a whole lot of why's leading you to answers you wanted to hear
While all of the things you needed to say you left in the blank spaces between the lines on the pages you never made it to
Your favorite thing to say after the divorce was that you were grateful to no longer have to walk on eggshells to protect his feelings
It has been twelve years and you still can't admit the feelings you were trying to protect were your own
And your feet still hurt

Dad
I have an envelope of pictures of you and I
From when both of us were oh so much younger
In each of them you are smiling at me
And in every one of them I am smiling back at you
I don't remember most of them I was quite very young
And for quite very different reasons I can imagine you would have a hard time remembering them as well
When I flip through the envelope I'm left sitting criss cross applesauce on a tore up linoleum floor
Staring at the scales of justice
Weighing the honest love of a drunk
Against the stoic rejection of the sober man you've become
And I am ashamed with how often I choose love

I am the keeper of this family's pain
Somebody has to
Someone has to admit it's real
One of us has to stare at the elephants in the room and see them
To know how each of us actually feels

Dear family
We are nothing more than four misfitted human beings
Tied together with tin can and twine telephones
By an astronomer, who in an effort to console himself,
Confused a congregation of lonely stars for a constellation
And eventually that is going to have to be enough
For each of us to love ourselves
To carry our own pain
I can not keep carrying all of this for each of you
I have my own pain
Which on most days is more than enough
I assure you
On most days
It is more than one man should

I dream with all the fervor of a hero
Which is to say that I die in all of my dreams
Fitting you being there
More fitting you not being here when I wake up in a fit and reach for you
Both silently telling me that all I'll ever be for you is a well written story
I'm sorry they can not all have a happy ending
I know you would like me better that way
But tell me Cinderella what's a happy ending if all you're ever drawing are straight lines
Tell me Snow White what is a happy ending when you already see it coming
Tell me Jasmine what is a prince if never a pauper
Tell me Sleeping Beauty why did my kiss not wake you
Were my lips chapped
Was I too eager
Did you find my heart impure
Well I'm sorry pretty little princess
My hands are soaked in dragon's blood
I have felt the bones of castle guards break between these fingers
Is it so hard to imagine that the champion who finally tore down your walls
Would have a little dirt beneath his nails
A broken rib
A hardened heart
It is with that, I kissed you
It is with that, you slept
It is with that, I returned home
And as it goes
And as it always goes
The next man came
Armour shined
Shield cleaned
Sword sheathed
His heart full of nothing but ambition and intention
And a little blood on the bottom of his shoe
And it is with that, he kissed you
It is with that, you awoke
Satisfied

On the night the last star fell from the sky
We took your grandmother's quilt to the trampoline in my backyard
Tangled beneath it
You shaved that day
I did not
I felt rude
You wrapped our legs together anyway
We watched them shoot across space like tracer bullets in a star war
Like a silent firework show in August
And sometime after the bats went back to bed and before the owl woke up to stretch his neck the last star fell
The night was so dark that there is no way you could've seen me staring at you
You blushed anyway
You always used to say you hated holding hands
I always assume you just didn't want to touch a sinner the way you touch yourself to thank God
You grabbed my hand that night and never let go
We spent what was left of yesterday trying to remember the shapes of constellations
Tracing them with quivering finger tips on each other's chest
Trying to guess its name from the feel of it
You were pretty good at this
I just kept guessing Orion's Belt until you felt bad for me
Inevitably speaking a star landed on earth that night
It was in the brown grass where the pool used to be
You must have kissed it while I wasn't looking
Your lips tasted of heaven
I thought you an angel
But you were still alive
I know this
I could feel your heart beat in my shoulder

The thing about fingerprints is not that, right now, there are seven billion different unique fingerprints on seven billion different people.
It is not that in all of human history no one finger print has been repeated, making, if my math is right, which it's not, twenty trillion individual fingerprints.
Nor is it even that none of the quadrillions of people that will come after me will have my exact finger print.
No, the thing about fingerprints is that they are utterly useless
Which is to say they serve no practical purpose in the survival of the **** Sapien.
That's a lot of effort to put into something that is pointless

2.
If we were created in God's image, then God was a man and
I imagine he took Sunday off and came back to work on Monday like the rest of us.
So maybe fingerprints haven't been forever.
Like with snowflakes maybe God's just doing some interior decorating lately.

Or maybe Saint Peter was kicking it with God in the break room at heaven and was like, "Dude...we need a new system, too many people are dying and I can't keep looking up everyone's deeds by hand; it's taking too long."
And in a moment of genius He was all, "I got this bro" and invented the fingerprint
Then went down to Best Buy and got one of those scanner things for the pearly gates and now when you die you just scan your finger and it auto-populates your deeds and if you get in it's all awmmmm and the gates open,
And if you don't get in it's all whup whum and you fall through a hole in a cloud in the sky and land in a fiery pit of hell.

(My parents stopped making me go to church in 2nd grade so my visions of heaven and hell are colored in crayon.)

3.
I wonder if the image of God sitting at a desk with a protractor, compass, drafting pencils, and tracing paper designing each individual finger print all day long comforts you?

4.
Maybe we're some Alien sociology major's thesis and our fingerprints are our unique identifiers for tracking and data collection purposes

5.
When I started this poem I thought maybe fingerprints are keys.
As in someone out there has the fingerprint that unlocks me.
But I've loved more than once
Hurt more than twice
And had a lot more *** than that
So unless this key unlocks something I've never heard of my lock's broken and I need to know who to call about that.
But I don't like to think of myself as broken anymore.

6.
Maybe when God's little helpers are making us they slice off a sheet of skin from the butcher roll, spread it out flat sticky side up on the stainless steel slab.
Grab a set of bones off the shelf lay them down and like canvas around a frame stretch the skin tight around our skeleton.
Starting from toes, to the knee, over the shoulder, around those pesky elbows
Until they tie us off at the finger tips with twine, cut the excess with sheep sheers, let it heal.
Fingerprints.
Our our little "Heche en el cielo"

7.
When I fall in love for the last time, I will dip my finger in red paint.
I will roll my finger across the bare chest of my love and she will wear it there
Like a tattoo no one else could give her.

8.
Maybe there is no point to fingerprints
Like arpeggios before a concerto
Maybe God was just warming up

9.
Maybe fingerprints are the point to everything

10.
Maybe an omnipresent God is at every birth
In every bedroom, hospital, and taxi cab
In every town, in every city, in every country in the world.

Maybe every time a baby is born
God, takes the time to name it
Then writes it down
In a language only He understands

I watched a plane fly through the little dipper.

The trees rustled

My back ached

My mind was jumbled

Your words spun in my head

We danced

Intertwined

Our bodies calling, "love!" to one another's collar bones

We embraced

I watched a plane fly through the little dipper.

And when we were flying
It looked like we weren't going anywhere
As if the earth was spinning just as fast as our plane was flying
As if the wind was blowing just as a fast as our plane was flying
As if the same pencil thin stretch of clouds sat hovering just below rows 11 and 12 the whole time
Until the overhead bell chimed
The light came on
And the captain told me it was time to tighten my seat belt again
I was going to get to *** soon
And the flight attendant said, "Welcome to Boise"
My heart fluttered
And when I sat in the front seat of the taxi I closed my eyes
Looked out of the windows of the plane again
And I saw it then
The earth moving so fast beneath us they ought to have called us super heroes
And we could not have made it here faster.

I need one more
I need to forget a little more
I need to remember a little less
I need to remember a lot more
I just need to remember it differently
Better
The way I wrote it
The way it ends when I'm sleeping

Dear bartender
Make it a White Russian
As white as her dress would've been
One Pina Colada
Tan as the sand would've been
One more Gin and Tonic
Sparkling as her eyes
***** Cranberry
Red as her lips
A triple shot of silver tequila
As clear as my intentions

Marry me

Bartender I want to drink until I forget she said no
Bartender I want to drink until I forget I ever asked

Dear Bartender I want to drink until I remember she said yes
***** til my head rings wedding bells
Gin til my body ticks raw rice
*** til my cheeks flush honeymoon
Tequila til my ring finger itches
Whiskey until she loves me too
Whiskey until she come back
Whiskey