I share a face with the woman
Who always let me down
How else could I love myself
Except here, in the dark

This is the sweet spot
No sweet tooth again
Needing less from me
I'll be less than I should

In another life I am born in 1962
I grow up in a little house in Burt
September 1967 my mama walks me to school
I sit beside you in class that day, and all the rest after
We write poetry together during recess
We play Laura Ingalls together in your yard
Your mother makes me vareniki
Mine cooks your bacon til it's burnt
We walk to school together every day
You graduate grade 10, and 11, then 12
We marry for love and buy houses next door to each other
You have your first son when you're 26
Later, a daughter who is just like you, and in this life that means she is happy
I visit you every day, we have coffee and write our poetry
Eat our vareniki and bake our bread
If the world had been kinder, you'd have been my lifelong friend
And I could save you from all the pain that led to you being my mother

So they asked the tree
If you fell, why didn't you scream
But I did, it said
But I did

Sew your good intententions
Like stones into my belly
I'll never know the difference
Just the weight while I drown
I am just another wolf to you
I'll never know the difference
Between love and a burden

I asked you this morning if we could see my mom
I woke up alone and not at home, I miss her, you know
We drove to a graveyard, when did she go?
I swear we were in her kitchen yesterday
Us and the kids and the smell of warm bread
How could you have traveled so far through time?
Did you forget about me and leave me behind?
I reach out for anything familiar, it's just you here
Older and newer, who did this to us?
They stole my skin and changed your face,
All they've left of us is our eyes, I see you still in the blue
Are you as afraid of me as I am of you?
Just because I do not know where I am
Doesn't mean that I am not your man
Where are the kids dear? Where is the dog?
Please, can I see my mom?

They stamped out your fire
Only to burn you to ash
Too unclean to rest
Beneath their dirt
The salt of the earth
Nothing more than a pillar of salt
To them

Death is such a simple thing
To have made living so complex
To grow around an absence
Is to change your shape completely.

I would have told you
About the way I wake up every night
About how some things
Just don't get better
How that is life
On life's terms
Healing doesn't make
The memories stop hurting
Healing make us
Stop hurting ourselves
That's all
The world will still hurt
But we could have laughed
At the brighter things
Together
Had you stuck around
Another day
We could have talked
At 2 am
If you'd have woken up
Just once more

Oh, what a sweet community
That was built for me
In your captivity
You said God loved me
As much as his son
Thats why he left me to die.

When I feel my ugliest
Aware of the softening
Straining and aching
Lines deepening
Changes from
Carrying little lives
I remember the skin horse
How beautifully real
I have become
As the little lives
Have loved me older
More alive

You forgot you were alive
Long before you died.

I watch you tend to the celery
Weeding gently, encouraging
Little leaves tenderly
"You're growing" I hear you say
This moment is enough
To justify the love I possess for you
If you can tend to the seeds
Dirtier than I could ever be
One day you may even love me
Again, like you did
When I was as new as your garden
If you had tended to me so gently
Would I be here?
Or did you need me wilted
Desperate enough
That I might stay forever
Beneath the dirt
With you

I keep coming home
To visit you
But you are never there
Oh old man
Where did you go?
I see your body in the chair
Your cup is still half full
But you're eyes see someone new
When I'm sitting
Where I used to
I introduce myself each time
But you ask again before I go
I keep coming by
Just to see you
But old man
You're never home

He loved me unconditionally
As God does
Promising me hell

When you forgave me
The weight finally settled in
Forgiveness stole away rage
God, God, God
Not again
What have I done this time
The dog asks
After it bit another gentle hand
If only you knew
The first hand
And the weight it carried
While it swung
If for pity or love
You stay
Oh, how tired you will grow
Carrying out the sentence
For a crime you didn't commit

I am weaving should-have-beens
Through my here-and-nows
If I could have been a child
I'd have loved my home
Designed to delight the girl
I never was, never knew
I can almost feel it
I know the space where it belongs
I cannot fill it, not with all the world
No hocus pocus halloween magic
No christmas morning anticipation
I try to recreate what I think I lost
How do you bring back
Something that never was
If I could believe in wishes
I'd wish to believe in them
Like I think a child might,
Like I might have, if wishes came true.

Sisyphus finally at rest
Finds himself restless
It is better to desire
Than to have.

I carry your wedding ring
Around in my pocket
The weight serves not as a reminder
Of your love
But as a warning
That even you
Could show such softness

Soft and supple
Sinking in
Velvet flesh
Feels more pelt
Than man
Sweet breath in
Sour breath out
Cough clanging
Against bone
Brown eyes
Begging
Milky eyes
To meet them
You're lost
Subtly fading
Behind failing
Flesh
Come back
To me
Brittle creature
Run home
Again

I would die 1000 different deaths
If only to be sure
That I could wake up just the once
To you knocking at my door
I would live 1000 different lives
Suffer millions more listless days
For just the chance
That I could wake up to your face

Scour the mountain peaks
Find somewhere no one knows
Scatter me in caves
Older than any bones
Long before the age of teeth
Where nothing ever grows
No jaws to gnash away my form
No men to seek a final blow
Leave me to dissolve there
The dead are safest all alone

The crow said to his lover
"Do not be afraid,
The farmer only has one stone"

I am pulling weeds from the garden and I want to scream "there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong you"
I am replacing you with something beautiful and hard to maintain because I value appearances more than growth
There is nothing wrong with dandelions i swear, please do not develop a complex, I just cannot love you unless someone else does
My father spent years weeding me and trust me it gets easier
it hurts less if you learn to hate yourself the same way
There is nothing wrong with you I just have to do this he is coming over later and he might remember he doesn't love me if he sees you here
There is nothing wrong with you but I will **** you still
Like my father
Commended for everything I grow in the wake of what I ****
There is nothing wrong with you I scream but I will throw you away and you will wonder what is wrong with you anyway
He told me I have room to grow before hugging me goodbye
There is nothing wrong with you he said
I just don't want you here

I knew I was good
I felt it when I looked down
Reveling in the work I'd done,
Yelling and proclaiming
So that you would know too
That I was good.
Oh, how small I was,
How small a thing to make you so angry.
I didn't know yet
How to make my joy quiet
For your bad days.
You would have loved it
If you'd have taken the time
To look at it.
To really look at it,
To look at me.
Would you have looked?
If I was good?

You sounded just like someone
I've spent the last 5 years burying
I wondered how I could have
Risen the dead yet again
My very posture a seance
Welcoming the past
Like the welcome mat
The ghosts pass over
On their way in
I never opened the door
I swear
I guess I just left it unlocked
I begged you to leave me alone
But the exorcist said
It's so impolite to ask the ghost to leave
If you're the reason their dead in the first place.

I wish this was about what is missing
I wish they'd have stolen all of me
Buried it somewhere
Pushed it out of a truck
Speeding down a highway
Too fast for
My mother to notice
Too quietly for
My father to care
It is what they left of me
For everyone to see
Out in the open
Ugly, marred
Screaming, biting
Foaming at the mouth
So unlike a daughter
The prodigal son
Is welcomed home
The feral mutt
Is drowned

Skinwalker lover
Call my name again
My heart a peach in your fist
Dripping
Ever longing
More, more, more
Lapping tongue
Starving dog
Cannibalize me
Again
I'll never notice
My pieces missing
Begging for scraps
While your meal
Grows cold

The unknowing of you
Will take a lifetime
Sea salt and sage
Music in the mornings
Softness of skin
Roughness of hands
Coffee cold and sweet
Like loving you
Like losing you

And I never really knew
I had to want them back
I thought I could be owned
Just by being wanted

I could tell you honestly
That I love you
But your laughter just
Sounds out of tune
And even his screams
Sound like a symphony
To me.

Loneliness lingers
Where your touch once
Scorched.

Stumbling in unceremoniously
To perform the theft of me
I had never been afraid
Until you taught me I should be

Someone told me once
To think of something constant
When it got too much
To look at the moon
And marvel at its permanence
Yet, if you could leave
Falling so far out of my sky
I know nothing is constant
If not you,
Then not even the moon.

How do you remove memory
From flesh?
If you knew the war zone
My skin has been
Would you shudder
Before every touch?

If all I could ever give,
Was just giving up
You'd still say it was enough.

You built a cemetery for me in your head
Just in case you found a way
To bring back the dead

Now you've found a name for them
All the elephants in your head
Memories stampeding
They won't get off your chest
Try to forget what you remember
They will still remember you
These elephants will crush you
If you don't put them to rest

Fill this emptiness
Beyond what I can hold
I crave a greater space
In a way only the shallows
Of the deepest sea
Could understand

A mirror begs no forgiveness
When showing you the truth
So spare me your courtesy
You can't hide intent from the guilty

After a death
It is the living that haunt their homes
All the lonely cries in the dark
And sleepless nights
Trying to feel the dead in anything
Other than memories
Recalling them endlessly anyways
Stories told like seances
As if somehow it will keep them here
A little longer
Eventually forgetting to eat
To breathe
Exist
Quiet whispers
Endless pacing
Silent visits
Rearranging the cutlery
1000 times in the night
To pass the time

After a death,
It is always the living
That become ghosts of themselves

The fear in turning off the light,
Is never finding the switch again.

In my dreams he's still alive,
How cruel a curse,
Insomnia has been.

My journals are a graveyard
I cannot help but dig back up
I wrote you a thousand love poems
When I read them now
They just sound like the eulogies
I didn't have the heart to give

This sits between us
Like poison between
Skin and blood
If you could give back
What you stole
You wouldn't.
Offer yourself again
As if you are the equivalent
To the love lost
Colonizer lover,
Thief of my soul.

I wish I would have said thank you,
Instead of goodbye

You know me as,
The creaky floorboards,
And the rattling doors
At midnight
I've been haunting you
For years now
I've been worried lately
You stopped singing
While you do the dishes
I've not seen you
Turn on the stove
In a month
You used to hear me
Breaking the silence
While you read books
Under your covers
But I don't remember
The last time
You sat in silence
With me and your thoughts
What is it
That you're drowning out?
You clean the house
Like the dirt is screaming
You scrub your body
Like your skin is poison
You fill the room
With background noise
Like you're afraid
Hollow air will choke you
The voices on the phone
Never last long enough
So you keep finding
More people to call
Youre always home
But youre never here
I'm just here
To say I miss you
To remind you I'm here
And that you're here
And that I'd like
To meet with you
In the stillness again
When your heart stops racing
Ans your breathing slows
I'd like to have the noise
Stop long enough
For you to notice
When I make
Floorboards creak
And doors rattle
When I'm lonely

Grief is a liquid
It is the tears in my pillow
Sweating you out into bedsheets
It is sickness in the morning
Whiskey in a mug before breakfast
It is the water I can't drink
It is the storm that kept me awake
The night you called
It is the rain that's followed me since
And the coffee gone cold on my nightstand
Where you left it.

My bones are too hollow
To hold my worth
My body is a chapel
I am begging to crumble
I hold holy water
In my collar bones
As I kneel before a mirror
I am praying to be emptier
Heaven tastes like ice water
I want to meet my maker
In a gown that doesn't fit me
The scale is an altar
I sacrifice my body to
Lord knows I know how to fast,
Am I holier when I'm hungry?

I started drinking on the weekends,
Like you always used to do,
I wonder if I'll drink in the morning,
On Tuesdays and Thursdays too,
I started lying to my partner,
When I go out late at night,
I never own up to my actions,
I'm not afraid to start a fight,
I started missing all your birthday's,
I didn't call you back the other day,
I wanted to tell you I love you,
But I would only be in the way,
Just like you always said to me,
"To be alone wouldn't be so bad"
I'll just keep letting you down,
And be exactly like you, Dad.