one of a few, mutterances;

you're "killing me!"

every poem of yours delights, enchants,
you are blossoming
and i ear and eat your poem petals,
your white rose petals,
so tritely perfect,
to the hard word floor,
freshly enlivening,
freshly dying,
and hope
my, my mind stays quiet.
though my
breathing pounds,
an overboard sailor,
washed ashore
by the surf in a
Baltic Sea storm


i read you,
and I am there,
i read you,
and then i'm gone,

taken,
i'm taken,
i'm taken away
but my body yet lies,
a fallen victim to the power,
your word~ly empowering,

to imagine

I’ve been paralyzed for three hundred
And eighty seven days 
Eleven hours; and sixteen minutes
Trapped in the state of Mississippi; as
Low as I could be 
With blood drippin’ - still
Nothing was delivered from my waiting

My hands were on fire in the parking lot
Counted down breathing
Hazard haunts the future harvest 
Playing Willie Nelson records spun 
On my coffee table
In the long morning
With light from the day crashin’ in 

Tied to my bed in a funny enclosure
Picking at the holes in my genes
Kicking up the floor of the trailer
Wonder if I’m all that’s on her mind

Silence chewing caverns in my chest
I’m workin’ all day
Wondering if we want it or not
Is love merely wanting in its absence 
Empty store fronts
Feeling like me
It’s not as I still need him anyway

My love,

Years have drifted by, yet still you rest inside me,
a gentle pulse I never wish to quiet.
You are the touch that lingers,
the memory I reach for like light through glass,
because to lose you would be to lose myself.

You woke the world to color:
every cell learned its purpose in the warmth of you.
You were not a passing love,
you were the one who taught my body how to be awake,
how joy could be a kind of undoing, a holy intoxication.

No other face has translated desire the way yours did,
not silver screens, not stray glances, not midnight imaginings.
Attraction for me is your laugh, the heat of your small mercies,
the map of your breath against my skin.

Even now we sit on opposite sides of the same glass,
hearts pressed to the cold, waiting and watching.
I carry a strange, unshakable knowing,
you keep a light for me in some secret room of your own.
I feel it; I live in that soft, stubborn certainty.

So, stripped to the bone of words and circumstance:
I miss you. I yearn for you.
My simplest, most ferocious wish is small and honest,
to find myself in your arms again, where the searching ends,
and at last, I am home.

Everything feels surreal
As though everything is moving fast but stays completely still
I’m running in circles
Past friends and empty faces
Passed stations and bus lanes
Digging up bones in the dark
Trying to find the exit
Eternal peace
And happiness
For I can swear I saw it once
In a red dress; on a cloudy day
and I ran to it burning
With the weight of oceans tied
By a rock from my legs
Left me kicking on again
Pulling at the new scars death had left
Again
On a shackled up ghost; shedding skin
I’m not who I was when you knew me
And you’re not talking in your sleep
“Well I’ll be ******
Here comes your ghost again”
Sitting on a barbed wire fence
On a dotted line; unending
Alexa with her literary references

Again
I’m doing it, again.
Losing my self in what I listened to
And it’s all back
It keeps happening again
and again,
and again.
Until I wish I couldn’t breathe
Until you’re tapping at my door
On the crux of drowning
A hand away from shore