I use the moon as my guide
A watchful eye over this changing ocean
Keeping the tides on their paths home
Always bringing me back
To where we had to part on these shores.

It's good to be awake
Finally
After years of half dead darkness.

You stir, sheets stick to your skin,
drawn curtains; shake off the spins.
A summit of buttermilk thunderheads
snap the silk threaded ilk from your covered bed;
a flurry of cats and dogs in Elysium,
but you’d even prefer the Devil beat his wife instead.
There’s no clarity in a mare’s tail;
can’t bear to see the day in shades of gray-scale;
exhale the sale from off the same scale.
You’d rather play jail than pay bail so you can pray tell.

And now I’m in the dark with a snare drum background;
hounds drowned barks turn heads, twiddle thumbs, and lack sound.
And a drenched cat just wants the home with the furnace:
the blankets, the treats, the tone; only earnest.
I’m learning.

I grew up in a house full of tension
and bad words meant in the sincerest of ways
the kinds of words that leave bruises
worse than a fist
and cuts
deeper than a butchers knife
the tension you could wrap up in a blanket and take to bed at night
those cold feelings that grew to be so familiar that you welcomed them with open arms
not because you wanted them or even enjoyed those emotions
but because they were all you had ever known
and when you take away the only constant in your life
no matter how much you despised it
you're still left with nothing

We sat tossing breath at darkened windows
A bottle to my mouth
And lyrics spinning out from yours
Dancing in conversation
Next to trash in the back seat.