The leaves scrape mid dance
Encased into a joy none know
Puppeteered by gusts
A mouth of our own couldn’t exhale

Six moths linger soft
Wing dust fallen and lost
Luminescence calls
Even our smallest

We are all just scraping
Against the harsh urban concrete
Pulled by the wind of our own breath
Which will one day pause

And the leaves will settle
To prepare for the sun to beam once more
For the moths who are left.

The wind is teasing my laundry as it lays limp on its nasty cheap clothes horse
Five dollars on sale. Whip that up they said. Is that how people get their kicks?
Hugging their shrapnel to their chests as if that’s what everything comes down to?
Haze back to nothing. Focus on eyeline.
Bra strap lolling rudely over the cool metal bar.
Like a fish in a bowl I’ll potter around my room until I can potter no more
Until no knick knack can be moved to a more perfect angle
I moved the owl ornament so the sun hits it in a way that makes it look scared of light.
How cruel of me.
Until the carpet is positioned beautifully
Until each piece of fluff, each gathering of atoms is disposed of in the bin to create a new earth with stuck people like me.
That’s how we were made you know.
I’ll feel the walls until I feel my warmth bleed into the drywall
Meaning only one thing
I’ve been there a while
An hour or so
Just kneeling
Watching the laundry
Shiver in the breeze
Faked by my plastic fan.

We wandered through the woods and found a wallowing bridge, creaking softly in the symphony of the spineless sighs of wind.  Gushing through its planks I could feel the water seeping at the weak  cavity’s of the wood. I was there and she was there and we were on that bridge together, struggling on its loose and yielding bones. As we stepped on its ribs, the wood sighed beneath our feet and the water swelled and the wind sang and we held on. And the wind slipped through my clothes and hugged at my skin. And we walked in silence. I didn’t have to fill the atmosphere with empty words with no meaning. In the silence we Struggled across the softened wood.  So soft that our feet were but muffled padding underfoot. We were careless of the bridges unpromising  purpose, that its defeat and surrender could leave us swept away in the cold stream below.  We were just moving away from the forest. Moving together.

Think of the best, then think of the worst,
Of where humanity might possibly burst.
Travelling here and travelling away,
Many are so fond, so fond to escape.
One has to admire evolutions work,
From atoms, to monkeys, to men hard at work.

Many conceited, precious or rich,
Though the question of questions is what makes that man rich?
Is it the kiss he was given by his mother that morning,
Or the kiss of the money that paid for his awning?
Usually I think, who gives a ****?
If your house is a shed or for a king made to fit?
Though the sad truth be told, and this is it,
Many do care, many give a ****.
Not for the forests, or people in Africa,
But the reputation the generosity earned them thereafter.

You had torrents and storms in your hair
Grey dewy eyes that whipped windy stares
And at the beginning I didn’t feel the cold weather you brought around with you.

you flickered like the hesitant cheap matchstick
That resides in between the fingers of the adolescent that doesn’t yet understand
Friction

Caused by two opposing forces for a reason
For an end product, to commit treason
But not according to your abundant manual of
Do’s and don’ts that mention in the title you’re exempt

under the weight of  so much paper thin equality
chapters damp with words that stank of expectations
I found a home under the printed lines of I love you, the running ink dousing me with a blackened perspective on what it was you really wanted for me

To give but not receive
to be free to talk but not to breathe
but everyone knows
you require both to form a voice

and without that


my fingers would slowly snap to the beat that my bones would crack
To the rhythm of your whiplash tongue
Which would flush waves against the shores that were my shrinking figure
The small women you requested at the doorstep of our relationship
Has finally shrunk to fit through the keyhole

in the shape of your accessory

                            Which is obviously necessary to put up with me.

I heard the tapping of your foot as you approached
and your presence beat like the heart in my chest, pedaling a clockwork of miniscule sighs

that I’m finding harder and harder to wrench into myself.

If I could sound out the letters to the hollow sound the wind catching on my ribs makes, it would be a symphony I wish you could explain to me

because the sway of your voice seems to fit in just fine with the cacophony that escapes.