flip a coin and we’ll decide
my blood’s hot but the air isn’t
names engraved in snow just melt and go away forever
dulce, dulce bebé de verano
it’s winter now, don’t lose the warmth you get in your cheeks
in the summer

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

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

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

you’d see her on a cruiser bike in your dreams
that girl, on rapt beaches
—that girl has more to her than perceived
guys elude me; each his
own but still the same
we delude—our name
is the one he’d sort of cry
in his sleep, or even say
i’m just that southern girl
not even—
i’m that other girl he keeps
to himself and no one else
but i was a girl
not your belonging
and not your world

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

cruiser-bike girl
he threw his chance with me
I thought I saw our names scored in sand—one lonely beach
one summer, one time
it’s a different time, I guess
a different scene, sea baby
maybe some time I’ll be swept away by you
you lovely, lonely current—
maybe in another sixteen.

writing drives me mad but i do it
for reasons i don't know, still
i'm mad at the world and art is the escape trail
like you sort of
used to be

someone called my talking style different
she could tell i spoke with the diction of an artist
a writer, perhaps
but i always thought i was the same old kind of child searching mindlessly to be caught in an internal chirographic trap
i can’t write but i try,
and thank you for noticing.

what an abysmal life
me, beveling down its side,
you not existing,
me searching.

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"

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

milky way
provide a way to consign mischance behind to them who stray
earth is but a minor stain in lightyears’ expanse of stratospheric disarray

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

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

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

tanned thighs
perfect music and perfect laughs
your house sits on the hill where the bay lies
grassy and stretching down to where the water runs like a marathon medalist or a
tidal pool circling around to reach its tail
you tail me too, when we chase each other on these fine white sands
tail me, I dare you,
get me, adore me
like you do at 3 in the morning when you have me on the counter to sing to and look at me
fanned nights, palms in the sticky air of a summer evening
spread like cards on the low table
heat simmering like breakfast at 4, which we take with us
to have on cracking shells and blacked feathers along the shore
I see your skin, soft, pulling sand—your fingers—sifting beaches, straining them easily
warmer than the sun—your eyes
august nights that bring the fight into you
you’re talking nonsense, but it makes perfect sense because it’s you
rosy cloud matter hangs above ‘till I’m under glass surfacetops, at the bottom of the sea
but I wake up just above it
to be a floater—streaming boater girl, always
really, just watching you, down with another, passion firing your eyes, unlocked
I watch as I do butterflies
wild and free to fly
it’s okay, I told you
you’re suntanned and you’re mad
you’re talking, like you do
but it’s okay
because you’re free

our weariness is waxing from these
fiery, hellish universes—
these same sick, fiery, hellish verses
rendered out of vile fiends’ lips
liar, liar—the price required
is a mere soul’s harrowing worth
satan’s spires, hounding hell-fire—i wonder, does he cede the
cost of his hostile mirth?

'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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I’m trying not to love you
I’m laughing at the irony of that truest truth—
That we were the slightest unalignment of stars in a sky of caliginous blue
You say you’re hers—
That’s not true
You say you’re hers, but
you’re just you.

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”

Wipe your eyes, my baby
Marlboro and shotgun casings
Pound piano keys and feel it in your bones, this fear you’re facing
Because Debussy can’t take away the sound through unsubstantial apartment wall spacing
Of neighbors screaming, growing skill in the use of debasing words
We’re growing sage to burn alongside the memory of heart-breaking firsts
That didn’t bring any fulfillment or remaining seconds and thirds
We are witches, searching for potions to provoke hard spells
To forget these troubles which were heard from the mouthpiece of hell
Our black cats and crooked hats don’t hide the fact
That these highs don’t last
And soon we will remember why we left yesterday’s December behind
Ice crackling softly in window panes becomes enough to remind us why—
These things don’t leave the solitary, unhinged mind
When there’s nothing else to replace what was once chased
On agonizing below-zero winter days
So wipe your eyes, my baby
Wipe your eyes
This won’t heal, not like the bullet wound and cigarette addiction
That you always lose
(And somehow manage to re-find).

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

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

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...

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’m capable of disaster—
Godspeed to the mother of disaster
Carpe Diem, Beverly Hills is ready for you, faster,
our minds are rupturing from these rapturous months
it’s all a little much for us
Surreality, angular surreality
We’re two-faced, defacing reality’s ideals
Because it’s up to us, that’s the veridical deal
‘99 can’t party, no—
Not like the kids
who can no longer feel.

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 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

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

someone’s talking love on a summer night
i sit and wonder why you were the only thought that came to mind
like cigarettes to a reminiscer of about 50 times ago, when they almost quit
i think october, when words came from my lips like diamonds—they were ugly in my mind, but i spit them out
and you called me pretty
when mixes from that year turn around and crackle softly i can’t help but miss the tears that lamented so long ago
when i could feel about you
i won’t pretend to understand those mindless fancies, but i see then that ocean which reflects the moon
and play clair de lune, which
i avow to do for you but it’s for me—
i’m playing to forget, or feel
that’s what we players do
money and music, it’s numbing or galvanizing; it’s up to selection
i’m losing the latter but it sometimes catches up with me
the hotness that rolls in waves or in a fast descant,
tears
and then i remember for one moment in the summer after two years
how it felt to cry and to be fettered by you

put your eyes on them
skin and whiteness
and sheen
lovely hair, they
don’t see the lack-
luster life we fear
gucci on sight
yachts, mazdas
shots at midnight
hyatt in the plaza
to dream on roofs
but we sleep blanketed
they speed, shoes thrown way out—
at least our thrills are felt—
not ersatz,
not lost and dreamt
or counterfeit.

Marigold, southern roses
in my backyard
there she poses
Camellia, there we dine
red lights, red wine
red tequila
Marigold, flat-pressed roses,
that memory, it’s the tenet
of my broken-ness.

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

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

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

cracked poets still shine
through lines—of hymns
and of smiling crow’s feet
clams look dull but I know what might be
and you do too

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)

Magazine cutouts
I’m muddled
My favorite time of day is when there’s pink, gold, and violet
Setting light over a stratosphere
Cut out a picture of me and keep it, please
There’s more to life than what you think you see
There’s a rose-colored glass over life, but keep it, please
You don’t wanna think about the sad, the bare, the lonely
Just remember the radiance, sunsets, and me
There’s nothing but clouds and blue-rayed skies here
Blue, and violet now
Fading to black
You always make sure
To remember the color—stop at the roses
Look up or you just might miss it