when my grandma cut my hair
she told me sometimes
she gets the urge to run
outside and
tape all the leaves back on the trees

I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage--

I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn't let you go
That proved she didn't love you.
If she loved you
Wouldn't she want you to be happy?

I think now
If I felt less I would be
A better person. I was
A good waitress.
I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.
Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus--
In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on
Is moving away. With one hand
She's waving; the other strokes
An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

That night I told you to find your own ride home
because I had better plans.
Plans that didn’t involve driving you back
after the high school dance

I wish I had taken you home.
We would’ve slipped off our shoes and laid across the bed.
When you opened your phone
to read the texts that burned your eyes,
I would’ve held your hand.

Even though you slide on a pretty dress,
and squeeze into a pair of heels,
bad news still slides it’s way down cheeks
carrying dark lines of mascara.

Tears don’t mean anything,
it’s the silence that stings.
The same silence that wrapped around
her neck ropes under your bedroom door,
slipping through pink glossed lips,
until you can’t breathe anymore.

Earlier that night we danced together
when your feet were still light as air.
Later on you found your own way home,
and lay wide awake, different from before.

She slides in her headphones.
The cart is filled of freshly read books,
the lucky ones with their pages recently turned,
gently pushed to the upstairs stacks.

Beyond the glass door lies
the world of words. Walls
encase countless characters,
stories that needed to be told.

And now the room belongs to the girl
with the music that lifts her from shelf to shelf
bringing each book back to where it belongs
from her tiptoes to her knees.
Her eyes erode the call numbers
while lyrics and numbers fill her head.

On the bright days a little hip hop has her
dancing down strings of shelves.
Other times she selects slow songs
and imagines the books are a part of her:
the early memories, destined dreams, the everyday thoughts.

Thoughts that thread through the stacks.
She tries to tuck them away before they’re lost
and wishes they could also be
placed so particularly in her mind.

Aluminum foil squeezes a treat whose heat
warms my back through the knapsack.
My friends and I, we climb, hoping we’ll find
a place to fill our stomachs and rest our minds

When we see it we know.
A patch of rock entirely exposed
overlooking the canyon where our voices echo.
Once our feet are suspended over the edge
high above the trees, I unzip my pack.
And the beauty deserves all my attention,
but my eyes are lost in another dimension,
distracted by a perfect breakfast burrito
one slip away, from unraveling in the chasm below.

The bus driver sits alert
as he steers down the streets.
The clock tics,
the city shifts,
and he knows every storefront,
and he doesn't miss a stop--
although he's always slightly late
for the schedule that has bound
this college town.

The blue-speckled seat cradles me,
forehead against a grimy window.
I radiate heat against cold glass
and wipe away the fog.
Squinting I read the names of foreign signs
but my heavy eyelids flutter.

The bus driver sits stiff in his chair
but I am melting in my seat
which is now made of green leather-
and I am 11 years old.
The other kids are gone now,
for it's almost the end
of an hour and a half long route.
It's just me left, on the seat,
my legs extended across the aisle.
My eyes may be closed,
but I know every turn.

The crackle of the loudspeaker
challenges the traffic noise
that has become my silence.
"Anybody still on the bus?"
I sit upright and wave my hands
so that Bob can turn the bus on 16th street
to take me home.