Each pad sinks deeper into the soft
smushy, slush that was once hard like
Oak paneling in an old farm house.
The snow melts into calm reflecting pools
but constant spring is not a blessing
to the pink skin underpainting
of the great white bear.

He is not in a gold rush,
or a hurry, but he cannot swim forever.
The rising tides will bring the whales
closer, and only leave oil
and Caribou behind.

What shoes should you wear
when the ice goes renegade
and leaves you all but stranded
on a liquid isle?
Polar bears do not dock their boats
in Bernard Harbor,

so check your snow shoes
at the door and be prepared
for pirates. For when deer
jump eight feet into
pools, predators
should still know how to hunt.

He is rougher then being dumped
from the saddle of a bay mare,
but perhaps she shouldn’t be riding
******* past vineyards of red rusted vines.
 
And if she is on fire then she should probably roll
or climb into a hot tub on ***** Thursday
and put out the flame ignited by the thought
of hoping to God his parents can’t hear her.
 
She had always wanted to know what it felt like
to slaughter someone. So when he placed his palms
on the arch of her back and massacred her lips,
I imagined her smashing his skull against a brick wall.
 
And when she is in the bathroom washing him off
her hands, with a published poet in the next stall
she shouldn’t yell *******, I’m not a flower
and start listing off the ten rules to **** ***.
 
Because no matter how many times she uses him
as her own personal merry go round or slams
back beer after beer, he will never die in a coffin
so that she can say he is already dead and
buried.

We rode home
One rubber wheel after another
Drenched to the liver in rain and alcohol.

"Right family, wrong housemate"
I said as your calloused finger
Ran long the sharp edge of my shivering jaw.

Your hands, rough, from digging holes
And coming home at 5 am
With ****** and swollen knuckles

Are the hands, that wash my hair
And hold mine, step in step
And lift me onto kitchen counters

So that our lips can greet and meet
And pull apart, only to reunite
Like us lovers, who long to never be too

Far away from one another.
One block and half, around the corner
or one street and two buildings away

We are never too far apart.
"I'm never going to die"
which is why I only called the hospital and the jail

that night you went missing for twelve hours
And left the morgue out of it.
If you're never going to die

Then I am determined to live forever
So that I can wake up everyday
To the way you look at me

Even though I hate Ska music.

I can only write when my still
beating heart, dances across
the page leaving lines of love
in blood stains. When I am wrought
in two, curled, fetal, wrapped
in others clothes trying to remember
how it was they smelled after hot
sleepless nights. I can only lay
a verse after I have lost my last
chip, and gambled away the last
pieces of what little love i have left.
When I cause myself to cry,
chained by foolishness and insecurities.
I can only say the words when
the hourglass has no more sand,
and the buzzer echoes dimly,
the last seconds a distant time frame.
I wish my words fell like a concrete
avalanche to the floor, rumbling
and shaking the ground, like angry
Gods seething over unheeded warnings.
I wish the truth glowed neon, like the streets
of Sin City. Where you can't miss the signs
and you know, you're exactly where you're
supposed to be.

She couldn't get the Brillo pad out of her throat
or the pictures of her family off the walls,
they just wouldn't come down;
but the lotion took the make-up off just fine.
He said, You're trouble. The good kind, like whiskey
and riding my bike like a dummy.
Sometimes things are just better left alone,
unless you're choking on the syllables and drinking
is the only thing preventing you from lying.
Soft, sweet memories have a way
of rearranging themselves, into confused little lines
and trying to keep them in order only scrambles them
worse until they are made of gibberish and I love you's.
So shake off the water droplets and watch them spray
into the breeze, they'll be gone in a second
because after love, even breathing you can't be sure of.

I couldn't love you any less than I do,
I've tried.
I ate my tongue like a sponge breaking
apart after sitting in a bucket of suds
weeks after the car has been washed clean
of the mud we sprayed on it's flanks
fighting and kissing like two magnets
meeting for the first time.  
Separating us is like pressing
the opposite sides together,
they'll only want to face each other again,
once you've stop trying.
How could I love you any less,
when you're the only thing that is keeping me
breathing in my own poison.

He pressed his lips and tongue
against soft pink power switches.
Flicking them On and Off.
Until the energy bill was high enough
to pay for a college tuition used
for leaving the rest up to a left hand
not ridden with finger nails filed to perfection.

Sliding a finger down to the ridge in cotton
*******, like testing a mantle for dust,
he ran his fingers repeatedly over the field
fabric causing morning dew to flood the fibers.
Ten tiny dancers, slipped slowly
along the topography of skin.
Like brushing the straw bristles
of an archaic broom over a bare
hardwood floor, his 5 o’clock
shadow itched my flesh
and hair shaved away grew back
in goose bumps and excitement.

Feeling my legs shake, and toes
cringe made him whisper,
I want to *******,
words which have never sounded
more like a plea than a yen.
So when palms slid on sunken
chest and ground pelvis to pelvis,
a mortar and pestle,
tightened muscles like a practiced
fight scene of fencing.

With pursed pressed lips and furrowed
brow, squinted eyes looked down
like a lawyer serving up
divorce papers on a silver
platter, and let him know
This is what you asked for,
So lets not pretend it’s love.

Pearl earrings and a polka dotted
mug, three shots deep
and I'm bleeding tar
and feathers. You'll be
in England and I'll be chewing
on cement trying to break
the rest of my teeth. Listening
to meteor showers whisper
that it doesn't count if the last
sixty wishes are all the same.
I remember you told me
you'd walk the Earth for me.
Would you still? Or are your legs
too sore from lugging the weight
of your pride and malignancy?