everything there is
to say is said already
but still we will write

because these fixed forms
are more than what they appear
to be; not constraint

but freedom in light
of your hand in mine, making
me forget my name

your heart in mine that
beats in time with the cadence
of these ancient words

we claim as our own.
kiss me poetically,
forget what we've known.

there was a time when my words were more than
please
and there was a time when you cared.

i taught you to care, darling, i taught you myself
and i'm small and i'm broken and i've ripped the world into chasms but i always thought
that you could bring me redemption
if i taught you

but i taught
you the wrong
thing.

you followed my example and you
lied;
you learnt it all from me,
how to laugh, how to cry, how to eat until you’re sick and how to
move inside another like you’re inseparable
and we fit so seamlessly i forgot that i was teaching you
how to forget yourself
because you're not you anymore, you're what
i made you

and wherever god is
he's jealous of us for loving so endlessly.

i've always worshipped you
with my heart, my battered and weary soul,
my mouth covering every blessed inch
of your borrowed skin

you've been my god for a long time but
now
you're not you
and i'm worshipping a
memory.

lapping lips of waves kissing the
shore lavishly. heavy tide spirals pulling the
body magnetically

into subaquatic realms
into deep subconscious caverns.

the wrath of the ocean a siren's storm
and yet a gentle calming blanket.

the polarity we need for nourishment
the emotion we need for healing.

in a thicket of white
robes, grape jelly &electrodes;
i hid carefully an a
typical circular sanity anti
psychotic. it tasted industrial
in that space between my gums,
it bled a fertile crescent out
of the sock in which i left it.

underneath her floral
robe, wild black hair &pointe;; nose
she hid playfully a plot
of bones laced up & showed me
the secret at sunrise. it looked
so familiar in the gently rising
fire, it turned a prison into
a hemlock forest, it gave a
new meaning to the empty term "wing".

in my life there have been many
mothers, but this one had a smile of
pure patchouli & this one shook
my cot until i was awake.

in her life there had been many
storms, and the day she surrendered her
lips to the water a fisherman hooked
her & untangled her bones.

they say i'm supposed to smell old
memories, but a decade later i
most clearly hear her singing.

they say light is a particle &
sometimes it is a wave, &when; it
is which depends on where your boat
is floating. &tha;; time i was a
fish with a hook through my eye
i kept swimming downward to salvage my life.

i was afraid of brightness drilling holes
in the surface, afraid of the dark spots
under the corals, and the whole time i
struggled to breathe in the water, she
patiently reeled me into the moonlight.

imagine my amazement when i saw my own two feet.

this is not poetry.
this is the sound a heart makes when you swallow it whole
this is the taste of bile in your mouth
this is saccharine-sweet cancer
(all razor-edge smiles that catch to bleed you dry)
this is the crack of your spine
this is the ars(c)enic route to hell
this is the twist of your lips when you hold in your sobs
this is a love song in a language you'll never understand
this is a funeral dirge for happiness
this is your blood, or is it mine
this is your heart, or is it mine
this is where we join
forces this is my rib cage plucked out to leave my
chest unprotected this is your cue
to leave me this is a swimming pool of viscera just
like you always wanted this is the coffee gone cold this is
your love grown old and this is
not poetry
this is your requiem.

you stopped caring about yourself around the same time that
she stopped fighting, which is
to say circa 1977, when president
jimmy carter asked you to turn down your heat, wear
a sweater, and you still trusted that things could change
so you wore two and shut your heat
off. she was no longer the beauty you married circa 1960, which is
to say she let herself go, which is to
say that you'd never loved her more.

now you're dead and she doesn't even
know it, but here i am getting ahead of myself again
and here you are hiding in the ground. i'm asking you to wake
up and you tell me no for the first time. your eyes stay shut.
now you're dead.

you finally gave up on keeping her home circa
2011, and you institutionalized her, and nothing had ever
hurt more. you stayed home alone. you
went to church. you visited her every day, and you prayed,
and nothing ever changed.

you went to the doctor. you died. you got cancer.
those aren't in the right order but you know
the story by
now. you can sort it
out.

you left me and i never even wrote that thank-you card that i thought about
for years, but i promise, i thought about it. i thought about
you.

here she is alone, here she is
trapped in her mind, here she is forgetting
you while you love her, here you are
six feet under, you silly goose. come home, we miss
you. come home, there's kolbas and solina and anything you
want. come home and maybe she'll remember
and maybe she won't
and maybe she's been dead since circa 1990
and maybe it's your turn now.

what's worse than the cancer - "everywhere",
as they put it, was the look on your
face when you told us about your 52nd anniversary. you
gave her a card and she looked at it for a moment, then handed it back to
you. they say she doesn't communicate with anyone anymore.
i think it's killing both of you.

i never wrote you a thank-you
note. i wrote you a eulogy three weeks before
you died. i brought cake but you're dead,
i cried for a week but you're dead.
i'm still crying. you're still dead.

i wonder if she remembers you at all.