You come from a line of pleading
heavy enough to slam the door, dampen the folds of flannel sheets or
a furrowed brow.

'More' I hear your glossy eyes breathe.
They've been softened by endless searching
Scan after scan.
We've made a game of it.
We readily laugh at our preposterousness
believing love could grasp and stay, the last shriveled grape on a branch
smaller than the others.
Sweeter, too.

What we have precedes us, I say
Grimacing since I don't know exactly what I mean by that.

Once, in a dream, I walked down a corridor adorned with empty picture frames. It ended at a desert clearing, laced beneath a silver sky.
My ears alerted me first: before me lay a jumping cactus before me, embracing a teary coyote softly whimpering a prayer as thousands of needles sunk more securely into its fur.
I laughed and still couldn't tell you why.
I held my hand more closely to the shadowy breath, every release a firm match to my own.
Either to help it or endure its hateful bicuspid sink into my rigid flesh
I waved my hand faithfully before the dog.
Diverted, the stab of the plant wounded me instead.
I awoke, floating down a gushing claret river
The blood shimmering beneath me was my own.
My jaw split slightly enough to taste the salty tang of my demise.
Looking down, the once-pale tunic I wore was stained, candied.

I open my eyes to see your patient breath escape, confirming the truthful slumber I pray for you.
I expect you are told to say the most, so I tell myself through your waiting ear:
Love is irrevocably illusory.

I knocked on your door
Again and again
I counted the seconds between each
Listening for a dewey breath between the door's crack
Onto the window bseide my furrowed brow
The dew would last until the second arrived.

I had to tell you, just for emphasis, that I'd never forget
Your charming expression when you learned how to dance

I fell in. Just as ignorantly curious as the blonde ***** before me. I saw construction paper ripped up in pieces on the floor. The crimson, jagged confetti, ****** like the day you ran out. I saw floating bristles of toothbrushes, someone must have pulled them out one by one. I whispered for rain and some forgiveness. They came two years too late. I want a re-do.

In the blackness of the darkest hour
I felt his arms tight around my waist
Loosening as they drew nearer towards by stretched
Naked, fevered neck
His stars all bolted my nerves to the bottom of my feet
Stuck like pink bubble gum, melty and stringy
Like 97 degrees
His sweet breath grazed by cooled, burning cheeks
His touch reminded be of swimming under the moon of
The darkest hour
Freely
Wildly
I drink in his laughter
It trembles the pads of my fingers
Shattering my vision all over again
I wait for him on the loneliest nights, when
Rusted wheels of cargo trains roll in, tight and full of history
The neighborhoods won't quit, even when the day does
He's always there
Nonchalantly kicked up against some shiny car, titled to another
He's wearing his darkest jeans and his James Dean smirk today
I slurp it up
Soak it in like he belongs to me
Like I belong to him

Released from salty skies or trees,
Crashed into darkened plains,
A treat indeed to hear the speech
Of finches freed from chains

They fluttered sweetly through the
Months that sometimes end with 'ember'.
As they fly straight through sunrays
Sparks cling if they're remembered.

And as the moon howls lullabies
And tunes her fiddle neatly,
Feathers flap and fold up high
For evidence fights so sneakily.

How will they climb the Redwoods
While they're cherished down below?
And, pray, partake in meals and feasts
With seedlings in a row.

Wishful wonders stem from songs
Of solar sons and sorrows,
They dart the pending prayers
And warmed baths of tomorrow.

Today I took a chance and sang a song of renaissance for nature
My nature
A secret passed among the trees as they hush one another in succession.
Like the toothy kindergartners battling in a shushing war before another activity.
I wonder why it took me so long to come back to this place, and why I even left in the first place.
I can remember, just months ago, crying and begging to myself to find peace within a now seemingly simple storm.
How I prayed to the god that I still question
When I pray, I pray to the temples of my mind.
Nature first because she's my passionate, angry sister.
She moves with the color of life and her breath tastes like rose hips and baby grass.
Once she entered a hula-hoop contest and twirled for years. Her tilting and swinging engendered a trance not even she could break.
We waited for her to abstain, but the crowd diminished with dissemblance, searching for entertainment elsewhere.
I stayed, loyally, as the others heard stories of miracles and wonders in long-away lands
Without stopping, I poured you in
I knew it was wrong of me all along
I knew you'd hurt me in the end
I'll always give too much
My heart feels little
I tell it to express, but it knows better than I, of when it should shut down and forget.
Where does the summer hold love?
In budding leaves that open so suddenly?
Beneath shadows of swinging backdoors of burger joints? Somewhere near rusty trash bins?
Maybe love swims in the air, waiting to be drunk and welcomed, relieving the truly thirsty.

Sometimes I imagine the cancer spreading within me. My loosened skin as its boundaries. I stole the same image from a storm I watched last May. Darkness overtaking the bluest of skies. For a while they seemed harmonious. Like the conjunction of lovers, long apart, retracing their paths to the open arms of the other. The billowy edges of the first and largest black cloud curled over the sun, a thick fleeced blanket devising the world from the universe. I remember its anger and thought myself ridiculous to believe in some sort of partnership with such opposite things when tears so quickly fell from the sky.
Now I sit in this ****-stained seat within an oxymoronic room of sterilized air and droning walls. I pretend that I can feel the edges of the malignant monster inside of me, consuming my material under its trembling lip, angry and cold. Sitting, the cancer was waiting to lower me into the earth in triumph for its return.
I used to be afraid. Like the first time I knew I was alive, for sure.