I walk the world with thoughts of you
In every place I go
Your voice is on the winter wind
Your footprints in the snow
And every tool I try to use to scrape you from my mind
Cuts your name onto my tongue
And beats me till I'm blind
I layed my head upon your knees and breathed the air you breathed
I cut myself when you were cut to know just how you bleed
Now as I walk this empty earth with nothing but a face
To breathe me and to bleed me
Until I leave this place

A poem falls short; I'd like, instead
to draw a single line from me to you
and watch it curl into a word
so beautiful it's still unsaid –
or press paper to the window pane
so that the day might saturate
a note that brightly warms your hands,
spills birdsong from imagined trees
and buzzes like fat bumblebees,
but I am bound by language, love; I can't.

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.

Oh, the old favorite
Boy meets girl.
Just like the movies
without the glitz and glam,
No hollywood magic here.

Fairytales, and love stories
Have always been her favorite.
And he, is just looking
looking for another notch on his belt
One more heart to break, one more soul to steal

Words sweet like honey,
and a serpentine tongue, he works his magic.
Alas Her guard is dropped.
All sense is lost.

Just like Houdini he performs his trick
And vanishes, into Thin. Air.

Oh poor Juliet.
Life is no fairytale and yet
There are monsters everywhere.