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.

Walls were pressed and hammered
Therapy for workers, curing pangs of comforts
They sat between fleshy webs of knuckles
On lunch break they would pluck pouts of moldy fruit
If only she could hear summer of 98’
Glimmering puddles and sinkable reasons
She could test her strength with Goldfish and a drippy, chocolate cupcake
Matching deserts of skin covering joints young enough to bend
They spat against another, sweating. Tapping
Smoother than honeymooners in a convention center
Frigid or uncontrollable, no one could tell
The breezeway connected teeth, the left chipped in the corner from
A muddy softball game. Their team won 7-2.
Wide enough to squeeze uncooked macaroni shells between
Became the dusky neighborhood game.
Transitioning humans, males most likely, whispered fears between that gap.
He was different. He waited in outside the doors, near the trash bins
With grumpy janitors, muttering, “fuggin’ kids” and things like that.
She loved how ugly they were then.

Her thoughts trailed him, what was left of him, as he paced
Searching for the mug he left there, no
There, holding wet tissue, no
Soggy cupcake liner
Cupcake, shortcake, cake, cake liner
Rainbow or musty brown from 346 degrees Fahrenheit
Baking Therapy Class held in her kitchen
Maybe because she could pound at the dough and it would never fight back
She neglects the finale of rumbling coffee exhale since she knows
He’d never come back. Not here or any party she threw.
But on another hard drive she saved photos of September 20th.
She’ll flip mindlessly through a Cosmopolitan, until she can forget his name

I want to go back.
Forward rather, under
Vapor, sweet as symphonies
Rising, falling coincidentally with each breath mother took
The lifting of her cushioned chest, cradling my achy, heavy head

After she tucked me in (feet covered, as if the air kissing my
Toes might become a switch to conscientiousness)
I lied to her, I made her believe
That I, too, rotated under transparent sheets, dreams
Twirled into freedom from earth.
But I laid behind locked bars
Crying and continued to plead guilty.

A blanket, sturdy, protective
It sits, at least I think it does. Three-sided and pushed up against a wall
I wonder if I put it there.
Holding the key to dreams, she cradles me in the darkness
A blend of color and mystery from the lamppost glowing through the windowpane
Morphing around the streaks, marks left by some knock-of brand of windex

Through this glass, mother caught my sleepless lie
Remorseful and gentle she cradled me in streams of flashes
Familiar and warm lights of the street cars
A driver seat of drunks, or late-shift hospital workers
Flying somewhere else, anywhere else
Later nights I would distinguish between the two.
Not very far off, without breath, she spoke of
thick dreams and sweet souls
she wondered and gleamed
At that blankets with holes

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.

Papa, how long will you sit there?
Cavities, or trophies of wilder days. Keep kids off drugs, right?
Remnants of teeth rot between hills of lifeless grey flesh
Moist as the dust that stood to search (unsuccessfully) for fresh light

Nothing moves anymore
Except for the 41, Guyanese invertebrates scuttering around unfinished floors
All dirt, more like home than yours. They learned you long ago.
They wait for your chair to lift and continuously tire

Sometimes before the hours tip I hear you, or try to
You play the dances in your head
Just like swallowed tangos and serenades for mama
She always said you could sing

I fought for the top of your feet
My place, where my toes hold on tightly so I’d never slip away
Just like I gripped wrinkles in your smile, pulling me down
Down past moonless flights. No such pedestal stood.

Mid-yawn, we breathed in springtime
I left a piece for you, buried in an injection
I lost my crown that day. Pads of my hands warmed as I sunk my
Head lower into the crook of my elbow, waiting for melted snow.

I'd cover furrowed brows in blue ink, sometimes black
Grinning under the blotting recipes for tomorrow.
“I’ll love you always, princess! Love, Papa”
Later, words I’d beg to forget

Only hide behind orange cones and neon lining
Dead tangles, weeds. Somewhere in the middle
Of a dump-truck’s load
American, frosted ****** breathe comfortably.
Frostbitten pepperoni scattered beneath the rejected ceiling.
Ancestors are planted, but if not, roam away.
Whatever is visible beyond shoulders
Seems like dirt, like sand.
It wanted to peek through dusty, unwashed windows
Cracked paint on the corners
And the middles.
The people who live here fantasize about privacy, mostly
Desperation for secrecy.
They plea for the interrogation from others
You can here voices calling from those broken boxes
Torn families obey roaring, ravishing, rainy, rippling red stops signs
Loud enough to wake internal questions, like
Why don’t they obey each other?
Pendulum-like terms slam the insides of skulls. Swinging.
Bob’s trajectory. Massive bob.
Winking at them as they sit and regret.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Hiding behind orange cones lining up. People always obey green.

Sometimes, if I try, I hum between the tumbling
Hills of the world bracing domesticated beasts.
They graze and grunt all over again,
Entering slumbers following the daily sweep
Of lactic creeks, thin enough to guide tree roots.
Dusk is explained by the party of two, embracing the dividing sun.
Look left to see coral reef skies swim attempting to grasp what is to the right of the Sun:
Silhouettes outlining prayers flattening dimensions of rugged Mosques
Still dusty from wheat flour and patterned by uncooked lentils, that
Slipped through missing seams of Burlap, blackened from the hearth
Malleable as a result of dependency.

Though only half of my sight functions, I reason that
Earth shifts without you. Watching centuries and some odd
Years of changes, I yearn to know where you have gone.
I peer from the peacock’s tail, feeling the pulse of the
World tick away as the fearless pray to someone new.
Your countenance, I interlaced with feathered fingers
Depicts movements, curves. A shame to be without
Language to fill the contours of a nebulaic expression
Or swindling modifications.
You put me here. My eyes anyway.
Expecting me to retire along with buildings for your worship
Powdery paint has spilled and faded along with
Others who have modified your appearance, their someone new.

Even as the shadows swells
A million replicates of Io, moo and sway home, tired from the
Beating sun, to which eyes remain fixed.
One momentary memory visits.
Vision simulate traces of wonder, travelling on
Pathways believed to be conquerable. The people have learned
What I have not. They pause, breathe.

My mind is littered with prayers written on
Creamed paper, bound with nimble, bronzed fingers.
The prayers are written to no one in particular.
One starts: You and I grew under the same angry sun.
We eventually learned all that could be done was to bathe in the harsh rays and kiss the fizzling pools of summer.
I watch birds escape sharp whips of winter
Finally understanding urgency by way of survival.
You're no exception.
As they scan the sky in the spotted sun
I wonder why you aren't amongst them, searching for the answers you asked me for.
Your mind is sheltered by thorns, is scarlet like the rose, yearning to know what lay hidden between the sheets of petals, blanketed by the whispers of searching crows.

If I could bite the stars I would.
I'd stick out my tongue, blinding you for just a moment as the dust would slide off, right out of my mouth.
I can see it now: you wipe your eyes, crows feet
Gripping the rounds of my affection again.
Your laughter would fill the sky, the air so thick I wouldn't breathe. You'd be standing, gazing and not noticing that for a minute, the earth had lost a quiver of its light.

The longer I stood, the deeper my toes gripped
Into blackened strips of earth' score.
My softened toenails, now crushed white seashells
Replicated speckles on some beach years previous.
I forgot the name of each grain of sand after drowning.
My shaking hands sandwiched above my skull, beneath waves.
I intended only to melt jousting memories reeling.
Relentlessly spinning.
I only knew I could finally walk away.

Fair is the sunshine that weaves rays
on the loom of callused, weary feet.

All before she surrenders to
gusts of winter winds, tucked carelessly behind
shadows of turned leaves.

The people, withered and tired, have ceased their
incessant questions of her too frequent departures
and mirrored arrivals.

When will she accept her invitation to stay and
melt the dead into the earth?

For once could I be the wind?
I could sweep the crevices and navigate the map of your skin
With warmth of the heartbeat I've adopted as a compass.
So steadily present until flux began to dance
I celebration over my victory in winning Russia.
We'll play as a team since no one ever truly wins Risk.
Let’s leave the board there for weeks. We’ll make a new game
Where we chatter and chuckle and practice crinkling our noses.

Still, after decades of searching for solidity,
We caught a glimpse of its tail around the threshold of the door.
Something licked those jittering moments into place
Locked, frozen in time.
We started a sickness, now incurable.
This will be the last time I hold any type of innocence, dripping from
The webs of my fingers, running for a sink
Or a container that will hold the substance better than I.
One can find molecules of my personal histories
Stretched along the base of the pale linoleum.
Without a notion of an ever-after, I’ll adopt these
Days with you as my middle initial:
Sturdy and solid and attainable.
If it remains tomorrow, you can accept it as an
Unwilled gift, something like the part of you that I
Possess. I promise I’ll leave it in the the desk next to
Band-Aids and cough drops. I bought them to dull the illness.

Pelt me with weather-torn, slippery pouts
Rough from the spirits' chilly cage.

Push me into fits of anguish, strapped for deliverance
Into pits of overbearing mystery.

Stab me with wails of dusted bones, hollowed for replenished
Tendered air. Sweetened breath

Tears me so that shivers may enclose thoughts, long lost.
As skin tingles and snaps slowly onward,

Loathe me until melted pools of crimson snow drown
Swallowed songs of sorrow

Dripping in time to the soft putters of fire,
Where existence ***** and devours reality bone clean.

Under my wings (I think) I’m ticked by patterning sea salts.
A friend once told me that the crystals between whispered
Currents shifted and blazed the cracks of coral reefs
Were once bits of my father’s flesh, the old king of the sea.

I forget him sometimes, I was so young (and how young I still feel)

Harpooners search for me, but I lost pride the day I watched him slink
To the bottom of a different floor. Sand as his coffin.
I swim, splitting holy tides. These are the only places to
Find some sliver, a chance of a peaceful mind.

All things move apart in anticipation of my coming.
I glide and close my eyes and wish I could hide away from the stares.
It’s as if the pieces of the world can’t decide where they belong.
The krill still flop over broken bridges and hug my frigid chin.

I still weep.

So long I have lived without you, Father. So long without the twirls beneath
Strict and structured families of fist. I let those schools pass as they learn what I never will.

I’ve learned more about the wooden tables, carved by men without gills or scales.
The tables and chairs spread low across the floor
Dropped from shipwrecks my father caused so long ago
Tattered chips still float and other games that I don’t know.
The Queen of Hearts learned that she, too, loves to swim beside earth’s core.
Once I asked her of the crown adorning her head. She did not blink.
I wouldn’t know how to answer either, if she asked me how I became the King of the Sea.

The second shot screamed and
restrained the rest of the grins and claps
lapping up milky, concrete streets
Something internal
dictating inhumane reactions out of her, wanting to
sew jagged parts of skull together, later,
hoping the American public might help thread a needle
Her hands weren’t steady like they used to be
Maybe chaos could be wiped and shed cleaner than
Blood bathing white lace gloves, that covered quivering fingers

Stained skull, candied like cherry juice
seeping from George Washington’s cherry tree (people
believed so, even then) chopped down
slowly imprinting fibers of cotton and silk
blends, suddenly transformed into the world’s
dusty blue jeans
Lady Liberty’s iron once tried to rid the wrinkles of

How lightly the President graced roses
white as a reflection of fair weather culumus clouds
Thermals thanked by American weathermen, now watching
Glory tucked away in the past deep into a date to remember
November 22, 1963
“Dallas, we have a problem,” nothing else could be said
Bushes of roses, sprinkled with presidential blood

Cloth, camel cushioned seats lined his head
a motioned grave, she refused and swept
fingertips, vacuuming shards of cheekbone, scraps of
A previous moment still standing as she reached out again

Smothered by sweat seeping bodies
their chance for a moment, a starred moment, “I was there,”
their excitement unwelcomed, unfamiliar through lighter versions of
governmental suits and the mist of adrenaline
Her body tensed, sniffing the air for his scent, wanting to sense
His fear, too

I am missing the spoon for the sugar bowl.
Rippled like rocks licked by the Pacific in the 60s
It is somewhere away, shining like tails of Peter Pan’s Pixies.
Looking down into the glass opening, the hole
Is now occupied by a plastic fork I kept from a bagged lunch Wednesday.

I used to scoop a mountain of crystals onto a perforated
Paper napkin, the sugar camouflaged above its blank stare.
Grandma would grace strawberry fields before my chair.
The scarlet berries plucked by her arthritic fingers, dated
And bursting with memories of great-grandpa’s farm in Cokato, Minnesota.

I will never drift away from that healing kitchen counter,
Not away from the times gingerbread dough, spread
All around it or the Neosporin smeared across the thread
Of seams of cropped shorts as I ran out to bike more, even louder.
Never could I forget Minnesota summers when she wasn’t so frail.

After all, I need a sugar spoon, so I can’t break away
So easily. I have to attach and remember popping cans of Coca-Cola
And live between those memories, not perceive them as fables and tales.

Without a shielded case surround his head
The revving world would never say what’s said.
How sweet he lives beneath a clouded lie
But laughs and writes and shuts his mother’s eye.
In blackened caves and cracking creeks he’ll speak
Of God and all that shares a curious peek.
A creased lovely nose points to dragons, toads
A day he’ll know as he plugs in sharp codes.
Almond eyes search for a will to mean
Peach doors compose the thoughts and glittery sheen
Of winter. A waxing sled moves, becomes
The symbol of his wild broods, his beckoned drums.
Dear brother, know that spirits may be guides
Toward murdered praises that the earth betides.
What will he have in place of past sorrow
A heartache of untouched grace thumping through
He’ll leave beside the road curved up above
Whispered dirt and moonlit walks, cloaked to shove
The speech buried around his head, uncased
The memoir of his name, once known, erased.

The softened pads of warmly, tightened skin
Closed over chords and venting stings of sound
No speech is raised above the fields of home
She only squeaks and hopes a sign will show
A ***** beg within her towards the goal
To free the words that make her become one.
An inch of time climbs up upon her back
She wrinkles puffs of laughter, irons frights.
Remembering memories all around her grow
Without a tingle of her thickened skin.
The sun did move along the trees that day.
The sea now waves beneath her blackened feet.
The world now pulses up and down her spine
And fly and fly again and wander nigh.
The trunk, her brain is hollow without guide.
She’s lost the end and given up her pride.

Within you there’s a place that makes you free
Drink through a straw, for life is there to be.
Now you, the moon can slip beneath the sand,
Without a fear to lose this sacred game.

I, before your hands found me, would fly
Past murky, flaxen winds and uncloaked, brittle trees
While ticking, tocking years marched by.

How could the earth behind the bleeding sun so simply sigh
At prideless princes, careless bees and frightened, frigid fleas?
I learned before that I, without your hands, should always fly.

Speak and thread the eye of quickly and softly luring lies.
Until I play in clouds of light, gently, sweetly, please
Forestall those ticking years that slip so easily by.

Wearily I pull worn reins, thinned and tattered, below the tie
Then pray for whispered secrets and rolling, trusting, fearless seas.
I wait, but still without your hands, I learn that I may fly.

Without much left within me but a withered, ragged cry
I’ll offer up the edgeless, vast and countless shuffling sea.
We’ll watch and share those ticking years that go so quickly by.

The smell of autumn rainfall, filled with dew and golden skies,
We lay beneath and count the scars the swindling jet planes leave.
Unlocked and healed, without your hands, I know that I can fly,
But pray that ticking, tocking years go slowly, slowly by.

The skies, with heavy clouds and smoky soft-filled light,
Morph into days that furnish this reality, defined
By slightest laughs that bounce between a mother and a night.
Young kids may never find a closed place or a door declined.
I find myself along the curvatures that shift the heavens up in ration
Of the crunched leaves, sought by guards who wonderously fear.
People, tall, (and puzzled most) ask questions, without all hesitation
I bit my lip so hard the other day and metal filled my mouth
Reminding me to never to smile harshly underneath
Before I never could quite feel
Content. I did this time in case the blood was lodged between my teeth.
I ripped the seams of four long strips on across a banana peel
This time, I heard a thick voice, say, “no and don’t you go.”
Now and then, I wait and listen, smile and soon it shows.

I'm simply a code
Another line, sitting
Waiting for my turn
To sing, to move
That pressure will surely break my pride,
Slap my spine. Only until I can grow surely.
Does it matter after you've reviewed the
Appearance and the charcoal of our hearts?
Only when abandoning
The ruins on our breath
And the fire on our feet

Be still within the desert of your heart.
Your soul whispers a middle name in muddled confusion
Parallel to the perfect storm. She'll be answered as she's
Beckoned before your pedestal. Her memory and
Countless fingers grasp survival.
Let her work, let her see you fully Allow bags and boxes to overfill.
She'll bring you closer to a version of truth. She'll hop in the car
Ready to drive between points of your screaming silence.

Shallow prints graze and leave ink stamps. Still seen in darkness. Your soul continues to stand alone. Final battles announcing the death of empty souls, nullified and torn. Retreat
Go back.
Comprehend sources of her waves fears and
Share her burden.

Reach further, she's there
Can't you see her?
She gazes and prays
She turns and cries for shifts
Within her
Without her

Succinct tongues speak out of turn
Slicing thoughts of strength
Lower she stumbles fading into shadowed
Currents, locked between steel
The skies trample and snap
Delicate curves of the heart

Flesh appears by chill
Breathy ice tickles tunnels of sound
Touching, moving all nervousness
Arising north, present and dangerous
Nourished opportunities hanging
Churning flaws and mistakes

What spine shivers against the blade
One cleave to tear deeper
And another to consume the decomposing
All who bathe under the stars beware
For hearts beat in the fingertips
Rotating to echoes of tomorrow

Will a knife hurt as badly as
The word dripping, hanging from
Your finger
A deck of cards choke my wrist
I couldn't break or stay

Would an intention change out of an
Increase of a biting soul? A flourish
Of untamed, unseen branches asking
Myriads of thoughts and passions

Where is the point
To which you will catch your heat and
Ingest your selfishness, your hunger?
Fuel an impulse, fill mysteries with numbness and certainty
Feed a desire, for completeness trails appetite

Get lost among

Hazel, dry fields

That search in the crowd for your heart

Keep it low

Tickle it with blades

Green under shades of

Dusty sky

Sweet sorrow seeps

Sea crystals drip

Staining your shirt differently than before