I want it to be night.
I want it to be raining.

Sitting in the stale car, looking through the rain-glossed windows
The raindrops cut through the thin steam emanating from the headlights and dapple in the glow

The rain shivers through my jacket;
Sleeps against my skin

Add: the cold plastic steering wheel, cracked by time and use
Add: the dead air of the car, increasingly humid
Add: the faint sound of our breathing
Add: the quickly fogging glass

The roof is alive with the pummeling, dancing drops and their reflection from the grim black steel and the memories of summer still living in the peeling paint and the time that we sat on your car and dented it but we told your mom it was a falling branch

These memories die into a regular, irregular cut-time autumn jig
I try to sync, but only sink.

You've found the key.

The car starts and we drown in the din.

The mornings are mine.
A groggy roll-over, crack each big toe.
Lumber to the kitchen, linoleum and particle board cabinets.

The brown buzz rising from my coffee,
A six-letter word for president, or a vacuum.
The sun claws its way over the hills,
Brightening the ragged winter air.
I shiver and rotate into the grey light.

You can have my afternoons, my evenings, nights
(Especially my nights)
When the asthmatic grip of daylight finally falters,
And pillow-fed sadness begins to emerge.

I want your arm on my chest to be real,
I want to hear your humid breathing.
Smell your sleepy, dark, aroma settling into the sheets,
And finally dip into the slumber of a happy man.

Gaunt and ice-pale,
Ivory fingers delicately linger on
His oak casket.
Red-clad, marooned in a
Sea of black ties and dresses.
He had liked red.

Civilized hands, gentle on
Her back, elbows.
She startles at each touch,
Eyes wild and afraid.

Frozen soil, in shovelfuls
Falling against wood
Which answers with
Dull, muffled cries.
New sod, eerily green
Against woolen snow.

They never heard her cry--
Her black hair her shroud--
Only her breath,
Cold and hungry.

I find myself wondering what my mother
expected to get when she
decided to have a second child.
There were undoubtedly
some preconceived notions
of what her daughter would be like.
I’m sure she pictured a graceful beauty
with an attractive smile and a gentle demeanor—
deep, dark brown hair like her own.

Sorry, Mom.

You had to settle for
a uncouth ball of tangled ambition,
the stubborn, imaginative smart ***
you never knew you could want—
who will overthink this enough
to form it into words.

At least you can say
you got the hair right.

why put your lips
on that cigarette
when you could just
put them on mine

I long to leave my baggage in your void,
Then stand atop the world
Whilst I stare into the chasm ahead.
I give you my sorrows and
I lend you my hurt;
Their everlasting bonds to myself
I will break free.

At this moment, you could be breathing in particles from another galaxy.
Foreign bodies flowing through your body like tiny meteor showers.
Bacteria marvel at the minuscule asteroids in your lungs.
Cosmic dust could be the annoyance in your eye,
Or the dirt under your finger nails.
The truth is,
We all have the universe within us.
Just like the universe has all of us within in it.