Time loops beneath my ankles.
35 minutes of being ten minutes early
has become a less than desirable pattern as of late

From the sidewalk I saw a bird forced to walk
by one wing’s drooping.
Stumbling along the asphalt, feather tips cocked in broken salute
and was filled with sadness of an incredible immensity.

My counselor,
Terran,
she was like that.

She had cancer living in her neck.
The immensity of which was incredible

When the doctors came to take it,
to break her into something worth living for,
part of her face left too.
She took to wearing scarves, bunched high on the right side.

Once she let me place my hand beneath the scarf. Her eyes
fixed on the brown bookshelf by the door,
I marveled at the nothingness.

I met her in an alley
behind an alley
a sub-alley if you will
down the street from my apartment on Westwood
and 6th street. Unusually cool for spring, asphalt glowing green
beneath lamplights.

She was digging through piles of broken bottles,
discarded kitchenware, and palm fronds.
Her attention shifted suddenly, as if I were the prize.
Grasped my hand
her skin drawn taut exposing raw bone beneath
“Why? Why is it so far away?
truck drivers, the bed where I watched my father die
report cards, Here. why?”

“Sometimes things just aren’t as beautiful as they should be.”

We sat down on the curb,
amongst the grasshoppers
and did not speak for quite some time.

You want to go back, you
Want to go back, you want
To go back, why don’t you
Come back, what good are you
Here.
You’re wasting.

My mother had a Boise
Love affair,
The openness
Built to last. She owned the sediment specks
Tacked to soles, Steel
-belted radials. Teeth.

Arid weather crept inward
Across linoleum,
Densely woven carpet
Fibers, under doorways,
Over pads of her feet.
Drying each tiny hair within her nostrils.

Her second hand twin mattress
Clotted with too many blankets flanked
By stale nail holed sheet rock.
Paint bowed from damp wind
Trotting in from Spirit Lake
Once summer faded from the horizon.

Eventually she forced
All her wishes into dense brine,
Siphoning out sweetness
Preserving shadows to
Stave off dehydration
Until the wet season returned.

Come back, what good are you
Here. You want
To go back. Why don’t
You come back.

I never wanted your love,
just the taste of sinew and skin.
Anything to replace my mouth full of failure.

Losing confidence is more violent
than losing Love.
It was just good to have a place.

Time goes slow,
stands still,
then lies undetectable.

Becomes the stuttering child
who won't stop volunteering
to read first.

We missed the good parts,
and now there’s no Good left.

Human beings are capable of connecting their mouths, taking in
one another’s breaths for up to seventeen minutes
before they lose consciousness from depleting all available oxygen,
filling their lungs with carbon dioxide.

Lately, days have been without sound.
If love isn’t permanent
neither is its absence.
Movement in either direction tastes haunted

I’d have loved you best in reverse.
Led the black tar from your lungs, climbed back up that waterline to massage
the hate from your kidney. Sewn your clothes back on and
glided through that abandoned doorway to a living room
chair that would forever stay white.

Language is a peculiar thing,
when I say the word “tomorrow”, I have always meant you.
A wrinkle slinking across the carpet
when I’m strung out on caffeine and hope,
kitchen knife dotted with who knows whose skins.

Love means something different when all you want
is a bed to die in
and enough change to love a cold plastic cup
dancing through tattooed fingers,
like stained glass in a war zone.

There will be times
you need to go across black waters
heal at your own pace. So I will build the most beautiful boats,
launch you from the docks myself. Strew campfires across the shoreline.
A reminder there will always be a boat
and land to return to.

I want to eat your hair
until it pools thick in my gut,
barreling black through my intestines.
Inhale your elbows, shoulders
every movement, noise,
the face you makes when calculating a tip. Moments laughter
comes so hard your face doesn't make a sound at all

Smoke still lingers in grocery store parking lots,
your puffy eyes hunting caffeine in the noonday sun.
No more a blunder on your part.
Simply a life of difficult days.

Half memories lie within these things.
A little girl who spent summers indoors
, for reasons I don’t recall.
Where her parents were, God only knows.
Venturing out beyond the sunset to drop
bottled notes into puddles and storm drains.

Staring with an amplitude that is making your organs rattle against each other.
I can feel you going on with your day.
It's the salute that hurts, a handshake you don't want to return
graves you planted yourself.

pick the wrong adventure in a conversation,
words move outside of time, today and yesterday
nostalgic for moments still happening,
as if looking back on it from a great distance

The uneventfulness of true struggle is quietly grotesque.
Like the death of a dog I know I should have loved better,
forgetting to witness anything save for the aftermath.

You can’t make fire feel afraid.
We were younger, and we are, and we will be again.

Your face broke like glass that night.
I held it together for you,
skin trickling through my fingers.
The sum of all your
hopes, errors, and ever-will-be’s

Birthday cakes, lease signings, Halloweens,
the man who will one day silence the noise.
These moments deserve you, like so many
others not yet ready to cry for you.  

Listen and come back
to me. You can’t have
her. We need her.
Come back. Come
back. I won’t let you have her.