The yellow spider the size of my eyelash
Walks the lines of my palm
a shadow, an almost-
spectral soul
To be a human—we lament—
is a rather ill-fated way
to survive these wintral
elements
I could have been a spindly
mark amid Spring grass
But I am with flesh
And a bleeding
life force—heart
And still, with yours against my own
in this embrace.

of joy is in its trusted end
today I walk home and the sun lows itself beneath the white earth
a bird chirps in the solemn tree
the tragedy is in the knowing, in that
the brown-winged bird will migrate down and never come back—in that
the song will end
I see in your face but an instant unmeasured joy
and also,
that bird will die
and we will always say goodbye

our love (in held hands, in
enraptured dance),
like lost language dies—
the letters, rose in my cupboard
Polaroid I’ll keep (of you yesterday)
of interim element
belonging to the earth, and so do you

and I—
will imagine you approaching me
one day when you’re not here

today I will not have to imagine the laughing eyes, the curve of the nose, the cheek against my face, your whisper to me that your love is mine
today and always and always and always
today my fingers touch yours, and I trust
with baited breath
in unpromised tomorrow.

(and like a fool replay the
song
for a chance that we exist beyond
the refrain)

there’s a poem in the hands you touch me with
song notes every evening from your lips

I wish that I hadn’t quit writing in my diary
because I don’t recall the date of the night that you first told me this
or which day of the week it was in August
but I will remember how you brushed my hair back from my ear,
hushed the buzz of summer nights so that I’d hear—
how my heart in the split second that followed,
kept its habit till your beat caught up to me
your low-lit face a song I’d hummed
forever without knowing
    and I’ll remember then, how you
    traced your lips across my skin that it might also feel your love

they say there’s poetry in the last snow of prosaic months
and although I miss the chirping summer sparrow,
the skies that set in lilac after storms
I know you’ll keep your whisper in my ear tonight
that I won’t miss,
“I love you more”

on the second snow of the year i came over to your house
(your home has quite nearly become my own)
you smiled and left your desk and laid
your head on me
and i didn't think about microscopic troubles
because they didn't exist
in the midst of snowfall and an internet crash
or even in a measly monsoon
i was just wondering if this was happiness
if this was happiness
if this was happiness

to me, you carry the scent
of birthday candle smoke.
your eyes firelit with
facile wishes
and I'm the match you long
to foment forever

i'm here still
at university housing
a three hours' flight from the hometown where i knew you
the rain outside here's rolling deep like it used to
loudly,
loudly
and i miss my out-of-tune piano where i'd
pray at an altar of sadness to play out the few songs i knew
and perhaps extract a single seething passion in my solitude
now walkersby can see it, the simple joys in a newish love
his stolid hand is the one to hold my own in the grey october
his building a midnight minute's walk from home
with a heart that's kind and strong and stone
sometimes i wonder how it feels for you to know
you're the man i only used to love
university housing is a fortress from emotion
and i in it, am alone:
sometimes quietly happy at jupiter's brighest hone
only when i ever swallow hope
(sweetness) like a quiet, loving home

writing poetry in the dim-lit cabin of a broken sea
dreading some great unseen folly
     i’m threading it through me with needles
i keep in the box
beneath winter coats and unworn textbooks where my roses go to die

it became the sea to my needy heart
we were the poem that fell apart in the first stanza
     by the time you apprehend this kind of sin
     it’s too late
the surface above just catches it; that
feeble light that grows dimmer
     every undulating wave

you take me to the ice cream shop where i used to work
i don’t know how to tell you that i’ll never learn
i don’t know how to love if it doesn’t hurt
i don’t know how to love if it doesn’t **** me first

you take me to the fire station where you go to work
i don’t know how to tell you i’m already burned
because i don’t know how to love if it doesn’t hurt
i don’t know how to love if it doesn’t **** me first

but we take the bus in the morning as it's been rehearsed
you always keep your hands near mine
in case i become ready again
to ignite myself on fire again
this time with your light
this time maybe
i’ll learn just fine

notice how I don’t shrivel at your touch
the truth is I’m not scared of love, just
scared of being happy

the news calls for predestined stormy weather. truth is I don’t want to fight with you, my love
though if I’m being brutally honest I’ll say that I want you in all your seasons
I want you in december when the rain turns cold on your skin and the gardens begin to run grey. I want you under the fresh air of arizona sun rays and in the autumn as the memory of june fades.
please listen, I don’t want to have to watch you cry
only to kiss away your tears when you ever do—
I want you when the skies are glaring red from your view, when you do and don’t
feel right I want you to let me love you
because that’s what I think
that you would do
and I’m starting to think that you‘ll take me in all of my seasons
despite all these reasons I give—I’m
straying so far from perfect but please
let me live in the twilit gloom until I see the light in your eyes again, I promise I’ll
be back soon
swear you’ll take me in all my stormy seasons, love,
I swear that
I’ll vow to take you, too

this broken thing, we used to call it love
well it f*ing tore me to pieces and it still does
choking on air where the skyline floods
I wanna unlearn you
untrace your kisses from my hands,
forget the things you did
that made you an unloving man
I wanna have one day
to just wake up and not think of you at all
you awful creature of habit,
wretched love gone bad in every facet
some day I’ll wake up seventeen
again and unloved by you
one day it will be true
one day I will wake up and be
myself again, having
completely
forgotten you

The poetry of long grasses at my bare ankles
Whistle June winds through their green
Your favorite color; the honest shade of evergreens
Today was Friday—I spent it
With one of my two cats freshly muddy on the rocks
The weekend sun sweet out like lemon drops
Last night rendered a nonflimsy vinyl upon my mind
Your hands gently bearing mine
Lips closed in cerulean light
There’s a poem in the way they graced my fingertips—
Sunlight for my weekend mind

In mid April the evening is an eternal air
Sometimes I can feel you there
Wresting me halfway in mock spring tide
Wresting me back by my locks at my side
I still see you standing in a motted bitter blue
My spartan dying warrior with a spear straight through
And even though I’m facing southward
I can’t help but look at you

Like Picasso you must’ve been born dead
You’re standing still in tableau contrapposto
I stand squinting through an endless April snow
Still dreaming of the acid blue that you call home
And even though I’m facing southward
I can’t help but look for you
You’re graven in the April violence

Just the way you always do,
You’re wading through a fit of silence
Standing in the April blue

today's for sitting still
the small girl in the window sill
watching as my silent rivalled whispers die
in february's lilac skies
today i am working, rubbing remnants
off of dishes and walking back inside
from the bus stop in 30 degree weather,
half the temperature from where you now reside
today i plan on kissing my teddy bear goodnight
kissing for love where your lips aren't
today i am getting in someone's car and then we’ll drive
to dover beach and maybe he will smile with those eyes
the two that beam like someone i've been
missing my whole life
tonight is for the prospect that could make me someone's wife
but today is for our nothings
in a february sky

Sometimes it's "it is what it is" strewn in whispers
Across violet rayed skies
Just whispers of what could've been mine
Repeated like a misted breath in February’s sighs
Sinking, my strife
Sinking, my tenuous
life in a coal mine

Does she look at all like her younger self?
Still having the colour in her cheeks
Still having a disposition to be called sweet
Now having written herself into **** and ludicrous
ways of being
Do you see her now?
Underneath the bridges of
youth unmarred whispering
"I only wanted to be one of the greats"

It's so hot
So torrid in broken-heartland
I'd become accustomed to warm wintry
stolidity
"Our everything" murmured blistering
undertones from so far away
What sad moths we were–why
did we ever succumb to the flame?
I’d never listen to music with wandering
chords–since then I never listen
to love-drawn swords;
All I see is four hands molding
sculptures from aching cells
and then hating themselves
like Michelangelo's Raphael
I see your eyes, drawn away like
flimsy curtains and feel it all again
the falling together and falling
apart
That inestimable work of art
museum hall guards forgot
to monitor; we felt it all then and now–
nothing
except during these stifling midnight minutes
When upon a frenzied impulse I want to do something, when
I want to do something wrong—
I want to put on
our long-
forgotten
moth-drawn love songs

I was always afraid to call myself a poet
Whirling around in little dark rooms
scribbling
Meaningless ink blots
Like a confused typhoon
Scared not to be led by my sisters’ driftings
Towards poetry and song-writing and all the
wonders of
Human creation, and all the while
Scared to be led
We’re always writing and running
And running and writing
And we don’t have time to think and
It’s too much;
The storm was always a shameful habit that
we had to hide
But what if, for just a second in the eye I let
myself
Succumb to the tide
And whirl around in little dark rooms like a
raging wind
To make a mess, to write and cry and to
finally
Call myself a poet

there's a feeling which flows ascendant in me
something like rapture or love
at the movement in your chest, and when i
recall your heartbeat by my head
your song whirls and dithers around me
like a mourning dove or a
euphonious revenant, composer of all my
lyrics unsaid
something stirs like a spectral presence
when all of your music counts me condemned

his lips taste like rapture unguaranteed
and love me so softly that i wonder if i'm free
but lately i conjecture, lately i still see
on late october nights - your face in that debris
(all we are now
is remnants in the sea
all we are now is a raging
memory)

tonight there is a newborn autumn
and pictured in it a little photograph of what
could've been
when a novel rain broke this drought and a
poem in my heart sang like a little wood thrush
almost free
tonight there is a young notion
rendering a rush like october rain
and rupturing this dryness
like his arms around me
tomorrow nears an almost hope
a tuneless number i can almost sing

my poetry is
about nothing
for years it took the misery from
my bleeding heart and made it pray
it cried rhyming rivulets to the skies then
put my tears away
my poetry wears black -
not because it mourns or
because its going through a phase
all my ink dried up in drought
the year the rain came
and now it
spends its extra time inside
just writhing in its grave

his tears are stirring in the hurricane that is
our love
his tears meet mine just where
the floodwater amounts above—
just where i left it, just where
we sought the oblivion thereof
and you still tell me that you miss me
so much, and i tell you,
i tell you exactly:
that the hurricane must evict
us, must allow—
the sun

i think that people take their love for granted
because i—
i’ve spent every waking night
of every aching month
dressed in every shade of you except your touch
i love and lose and hurt
and lust
your memory cannot sustain—your memory
is not enough—
to simply have your presence is the
thing for which i blow—
on candles
angel numbers, dandelions—even snow

and why, i always wonder
do so many that i know
take their love nearby for granted—
that’s one thing i’ll never know

the lights flicker off, and i hear it almost—
this year’s song from last year’s ghost
he plays it on repeat, the one that
fades out too fast like september heat
i don’t wanna sing anymore, but my mouth
drives forward in wintry retribution—
“take me back—” to feel the rains of one summer
kiss my skin until this one freezes over
and it passes into me: revenge,
the weekends, the years i miss the most
'till i watch it drifting through me
like mortality to the ghost

with her face as a canvas she coloured
her cheeks as bright as peaches in the sun, her lips as dark
as cherries picked and run, her eyes as sad
as storms not yet begun
and began the day, the sky her
favourite shade of grey
for once

i just find it so **** crazy
     (or maybe i'm just crazy)—
that the preying mantis on my porch
has a soul
and that earwigs experience fear
     and that the honeybee in my backyard
knows all her peers
and that one of them, perhaps
hopes to grow old—
     or, at least, to make it a year—
and now finds with her eight eyes
her daughter a smear
on the picnic blanket on an
     arbitrary Wednesday
she's watching with eight eyes—
    
perfectly clear

maybe i'm crazy but isn't it also crazy
     how we look just like ants from afar?

i guess that i just can't believe
that you and me—
that i thought that this could ever be
we said that we loved but our love
never swayed gently with the trees, our love
never stayed in the event of a breeze, our love
became a season that flutters in degrees

there is a bottle out there somewhere on the sea
and inside is a letter written
to you from me
of all the things that i wished that we could be
and all the things i chose not to believe —
of all the words i swore i'd never
speak

all the stars above remind me
of the only things that we both see
and i know you're either half-alive or half-asleep
wishing wishing wishing wishing
wishing wishing
wishing

I’m weak without you and I’m weak
in your presence
Admiring your essence
Like you were sculpted by God to stand in the Garden of Hesperides

you ever just not know what to say? write? feel?
but then your skin feels him—almost, truly, feebly
and breathing
it was one kiss but i still...
he still loves me—
he doesn't love me
i still... i still
do you remember my red sweater?
the one i wore that day before leaving you?
i'd hold it to my face—as if to conjure the smell of you
and your handwriting's beautiful,
i don't care that it's bad, or that you
said it was
i still... i still vacuum the excess
but it never escapes
little jewels
little dust molecules
and little morsels of almost-nothing
that cling to my hair like snow
i still... i still...

Like Wasatch collapsed
for the two of us to be here
Harvey parted his torrent
and tempest, and fear—
That your lips would find mine.

there are tears on the piano scores
i play for you
tears on the letter that you wrote
that flew
from 1500 miles of blue
across Pacific, the Gulf—
it’s true
all the seas between
us made of tears
my music made of all my fears
that you would never get through
that blue
‘till all of my cried-out notes
rung true
and all my tears forged seas
for you

i strip metaphors off my skin
the feeling of you, something i never knew
i drink similies like they're gin
wishing and wishing and wishing,
i wish

i try to stop loving you —
how does one stop loving you?
you're an august rainstorm, though
summer's so faraway
i died the first time
you touched me;
your voltage and my vulnerability
hurricaning like houston does,
flooding my eyes like the torrid streets
last may
what i wouldn't give to be struck by you
again, just one last day

i'm all broken pieces
you looked at me like my hair was
dessert *** dripping down,
a dream, your eyes tearing through me
tears raising my exalted
sea
floods shattering my precipitous
strength
like my body was porcelain, i'm the
doll you lived to love and to hold
but never did
oh, brush my hair the way you’d do
just put me together again,
i beg of you

i'm going mad, sylvia
  sylvia, save me
    from the psychopath
my writing's bad
  but i'm a scientist
    i won't lie, it's
true that my own
  words evade me
    and non-truths persuade me
i found a love, he's faraway, he
  loves me too
    but i'm a writer,
not a liar;
  i'm not someone he can call his
    in this
world or the next
  my writing's bad but i'm alive
    i'm getting sad but i can write
about it, i suppose
  sylvia, i'll be a crying rose
    that dies when the words rain
because water doesn't suit
  me
    but i'm a swimmer, i'm the rain
so words will always
  choose me

maybe I could drive away, drive my way
towards you
get past Tennessee
and through
watch the flowers die and bloom
maybe if I lose my mind—
come closer to the truth
maybe if I look for you
in mountains you’ll be carved into
them just the way
I always do—
you’re in my mind
you’re in my room
I see you in the phantom blue, I
fall I drown I look for you
I close my eyes, don’t wanna lose

I close my eyes;
the flowers bloom

i feel your arms around me in phantom form
i feel you here and it hurts me more, but
i embrace the pain in seeing
your phantom face
because i'd rather dream you up
than not have you at all
here in this lonely place

your aching lungs seek life—
is breath mist or is it smoke
from fire underneath your tongue
borne of words you nearly say
but don't
trust the fire—burn the leftover
sawdust in your mouth, don’t put it out
there’s stardust in your veins
don’t put it out

it's a deep blade
buried like a treasure
wade your way through to the heart but
mountains stop you every measure
every way
every chance you get
you take but i can't heal myself today
and i'm sorry

i say i miss you more
i see your face all etched
into my mind like mount rushmore
i say i miss you more but maybe
i've been missing my hometown or
the way i felt my cheeks flush pink
from sun i soaked in on the shore
i miss the heat, i miss the warmth
i miss the pretty things i wore
you noticed them,
i noticed more
i'm sorry i never talked to you
i wish i understood it for
myself

'strength or energy' -
'coercion or compulsion' -
  'push or pull,' you made me lull
    myself away from myself
     in parlous daydreams
      it was the object, the promise, the need
       for you against
        me, unmet because of the headstrong
         mountains in-between
           it was the bells
           pavlov felt would make me
          your dog, your perfect angel-
         demon infidel, and to answer your question
        i don't believe
       in us anymore, but there's a difficult heat
      from the matter inside me
     the human that breathes
    for your reality
   that lulls itself to sleep with nonsensical scenes, with
  the sleepy possibility
of you and me

i used to believe that love was a lie
but it's not
i used to cry for its lack, but it is -
it's just lost
i folded in love, i sunk so many stories

still, love's not all stories
it's heat and it's hot and it's
summer
then it's gone
with my tears after 2 am -
the time that i thought
about the miles between us, and the
inches between love and lust

no, it was love, i know that it was,
but it fell, it
collapsed on papery limbs
like a 17-year old girl does
when it fought

i long for that time
when we were just fourteen, and
you knew me at all

you know me, I play
pianos just where I find them
and smile at my zeal

remember you then
fifteen, laughing at my jokes
I wish that were you

it used to throw me
into a wall and i banged my head
so many times that i realized
that it’s in my mind, “time”

it’s a story aching to be written -
only it’s a story
lacking characters, and they were kiddin’
when they said that time was tangible -
truth is, we’re here, we’re now, we’re infrangible
the story wasn’t written for us to keep

and i don’t think it’s right that time hangs from the clocks in a ticking glass
or that it’s a vase of dying roses only
potentially shattered by poets
time’s a lie
time’s what keeps you on rhythm,
on rhyme

age strips from you
the rapture of being in the moment
what’s passed grips you
‘til you’re stock-still, speechless, stricken only
with rainy days in the memory places,
sleepless nights and splintering vases -
rather,

smile at the starlit galaxy,
feel live symphonies in all your cells, and
taste the choruses that freed your throat of a stupid lock
that clicked when someone deemed you “not enough -“
not enough?
you’re filled with stories, you’re making one right now, and think
how every moment is with you
each time you inhale, since you first sought breath
with infant lungs
the moment you escaped this hellish jail

time is not a ticking glass
it’s laughing with me after class
and knowing that will always last
in you no matter how far
or how fast
i go from what’s long, gone, passed
because time is in fact
a useless mass
of numbers in a ticking glass.

baby's breath, tulips, disorientation,
swinging to saxophonists in french yards
and for this I cry when waking
because you’re only a fool's gold,
a vinyl alyssum, a grafted painting
yet I see you here still
on these tonic midnights
lurking in the garden of tuileries.

pray tell
why do i do this
“i hate you,” i swear by it
until you exhale and i descry you’re not a dream’s souvenir
i hate you i hate you i hate you

you made me origami roses
origami poses like a person, primal, primitive
you’re like that, i was into it
i found your dancing eyes and let-go laughs in september sky-lines beautiful
remember when you were almost just mine?
i don’t think you do
origami roses for you
she’s just for you, it’s clear as tonight’s sky
even behind rose-coloured glasses in my vision-line, though imbued with tears
go away, please
go away now
i can’t handle to see the roses
and not be able to stop and smell
no, we can’t be just friends
it’s hell
go away now, please
go away now