I knew we’d have to say goodnight
on a hillside, bathed in city lights
I waited for you to kiss me

We let the ocean set us afloat
I read the letter that you wrote
It pulled me back to sea

The crack in your windshield gleamed
as it split open freeway beams
I watched them paint you

I waited for the morning light
my eyes burned when you took flight
I’d stretch my love East

for Patrick,
                    if he can still hear me

Rise, every neighbor!
Hear the cacophony of dragon fire
BANG, BANG
and the pitter patter rain fall of disease
T T T T
pouring over your households this evening.

Catch that butterfly, there, boy!
And know that in your future you will be begging
to look as hideous as a moth
banging your skull against the roof of my trunk
as I drive away with your body.

You beg me
give me reason!
and I try, but it's so difficult
I don't want to live!
and what am I supposed to do to help
when you don't want the help I give?

And we plead to gaze at stars over the Causeway
going seventy in the sunroof as off in Norco
the refineries let go a blaze jealous of the sun.

The moon doesn't shine as brightly as I remember.
Maybe I was too young to understand light pollution
or maybe it's the gnawing away of the ozone
as my skin tightens and ages over my teeth.

Do you understand how permanent
death
is?

Let me show you, this:
the vision you are trying to make me live through;
I will not let you force me into folding
your hands over your chest
while the embalming fluid grows stiff
beneath your cold hands.

I *will not cry for you, if you bleed out your sorrows on a tile floor
or over a dark carpet
or crushed against the wall in your blue Mustang.

I will not cry for you,
but for the life you left behind,
the life you took, the life you stole
from me.

ME.

I have faced death with weakening knees;
I have knelt before the toilet whispering
please someone anyone
when it was too early in the morning for anyone to hear.

I have emptied the medicine cabinet of its promising contents
to find that nothing but
nothing
waited for me on the other side of ignorance.

Pain;
and it rains lightly on Tuesday evenings.

Somewhere behind the doorjamb is a flute
being played by a breeze
through the window you left open.

The note you will never write is tickled by the wind
and a thousand sunsets later--
I do not forget you.

Staring at every strand of noodle in my plate
as it swirls around my fork
that's the best I can do here
with you, all of you
so pretentious you
so self obsessed you
erasing the thin line between insults and fun
you, the ever so cocksmart, you
waiting for time to pass by
one millisecond at a time
raising my spoon, slowly,
doing injustice to its destiny of fulfilling
the tongues it touches
gulp
I can feel it, whole
lowering down my throat, part by part
being pulled down, like me by you
and down it goes
while I play with the next strand around the daunting fork.