We will forget the times I breathed your name into the sky
and made it rain.

The thought of you will become a ***** verse in the anthology of
apologies I figured in my sleep.

I will forget the touch of your skin
in the way you forgot how to love.

I could tell you of romance,
I could tell you of Sicily
and sanctity,
and what cold-blooded loving is like.

You can touch me like an iron blade,
rusted, perused;
and carve into me stolen serenades.
Jigsaw my dreams into sense,
I’m a little too tired of waking up alone.

We can do a give-and-take of hands
and we can go look for things we lost.
I could tell you how to love,
if you can show me how to stop.

Love someone who you cannot even
look in the eye:
it's not the demons in their self
but the way they make your heart
skip two beats instead of one
and maybe the realization that
they need not more than one look to know
you have already decorated a heart shaped room
in your ribs for them to find their home.

That's all they'll need to know
how once they let you in
you'll overstay
and lose your mind every time
their footsteps echo in the silent soundbox
of your conscious.

We don't talk of storms when they aren't already there;
if they can't fix you up,
they'll teach you how to ache instead,
and perhaps I'll learn to forget how to
give myself away in my smiles
and scribbles.

and scribbles.

I am leaving scratches on the ground; dragging
my feet: they no longer take me home
if there is one.

The tree in the backyard fell during the storm
and with it went the young years of my life
torn in half by the lightning

and took from me the shade I sought
in your hair and the thoughts they often led me in
and some belief in fantasies.

Even my dreams won't cross the threshold of the room
I confine you in; you haunt me
like homesickness and runaways.

You gave your life to the birdhouse
and waited for the wings to reveal themselves; flutter
and fly away.

The spaces between my fingers wanted
to fill with the bones of yours with such urgency
that I forgot how cold it always felt

and I could never guess if
it was your skin
or your heart.

There are fireflies in the garden during the dawn
and the moon, till the day, stays
hung over shuttered windows like some
homeless
hopeless looking for love.

You turned my world onto its head
and brought me down in chains; now
bubbling the last of me in some
Chinese torture chamber of love
in a dark room of your mother's house
full of the horrors of your childhood
and your children.

You scar this skin like I can go out
wearing every verse that escaped your tongue
like a trophy fallen to dust:
gone sheen, glory and all.

Rivers are finally flowing backward
and I swear I saw pigs fly
in a sky as pink as the lips of you on your glass of venom.

Galleries of art are slipping into the street
because masterpieces were absolutely
nothing when it came to the abstracts
of brilliance and dark you could create
by the harrows of your mind.

I was no story teller and
I could never put you to sleep.
So you slip away from my bed, mind, heart and hand.

And it tastes like a broken marriage
too hot on the tongue
and too far gone to believe
it could become unmended.

Rain sometimes falls in numbers
one here, twice there.
On me
**all at once, all the time.

Stupidity tastes surprisingly like guilt.