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

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

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.

sugar-drunk,
i was looking at you
to remember when life was just slow dances, expanses
of time
when we laughed, when I didn’t eulogize forgotten guys,
then, I saw no one but you
super drunk,
i was looking at you
just looking at you

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

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 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

my blind eyes didn’t follow—
moments pass by in the rear-view
margalo, the happy years
life’s just a pool of draining shallows.

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I’d love you violently if I had you
I’d watch your violets turn to dust and seem like new
(Until I had you)
The ones you left behind with your ever-seizing dialogue
This is a mere apocalyptic log in which
I tear apart those moments before turning crazy
I went crazy for
you,
your dead violets
and like petals—strewn, your
disconcertingly
violent mind.

I was never vivacious;
Pétillant girls giggled
So did I
I was dissimulating,
Pretending at points;
In school, secondary—
Yet, after having chased reveries, flat dreams, insipid ends, and
having ruled all aims vain—
To them, I think,
I was, still, positively,
vivacious.

Look at you,
You’ve forgotten the solace of your mother’s warmth, the succor of your father’s love form
Look at you,
Begotten by one worthy pair and yet having failed to grant them an ample heir
Look at you,
Failure, you wayward daughter with eyes caught in the confines of dreams
And yet you’ve seen everything there is to see.

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?

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

pretty american houses
pretty bays
and boys and happenings
hidden dreams fly out like smoke, in rings, in threes
candled wishes don’t go far—
but i don’t know about these dancing stars
twinkling, aren’t they?
the eyes of God
that bestow heavied wonders
on the shore
underneath the doors
of those pretty american
beach house floors
stars, wished on with this treasured heart
of yours
it’s ethereal, your existence
your words are like the sea
i hear them roar when i’m asleep
i love you still i love you

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