You can’t keep choosing someone who doesn’t choose you. You can’t. Because your person is going to be your person for the rest of your life. Not just when you’re young and things are perfect, but when things get messy and when you make mistakes and the world is less shiny. You have to make sure that you have someone by your side that wants to be there. Someone who wants to support you, and encourages you. Someone who gives you as much effort as you give them. Someone who wants to hear you laugh, and make breakfast with you, and listen to all of your dumb jokes for twenty, thirty or even fifty years. Because there’re difficult things in life, really hard and haunted things that make it heal and hurtful at times. But love shouldn’t be one of those things. Love should be your safe place. So please, just don’t give up the best parts of yourself to someone who doesn’t see the value in what they’re receiving. Don’t settle for anyone who doesn’t look at you and know, without hesitation, that they want to stay.

I keep it closed and locked,
In an imaginary, leather binding,
With its many pages compressed,
So that memories far apart
Are easier to retrieve,
Like scooping pearls
and shells on the sand.
There are stories of great adventure,
Tiny incidents like crystals
Shivering in the sun.
Lovers I knew in ancient times
Sleep among the pages
But come to life as I read,
My eyes caressing them as
My hands once did their skin.
Colors of eyes and hair remembered
Leap to paint the air around me:
Yellow sunlight and bodies moving,
Both electric and languid
In tangled sheets or long grass
After passion passed.
Some flashed like fireworks,
But others burned long and slow,
Not ready to love, nor to let go.
Smiles across a playing field,
Surprise midnight visits on holidays,
Costumed for Halloween with tiny stars
That shimmered on the stairs next morning,
Or inebriate feasts on the Fourth of July,
Tanned in the water and soothed at night.
There are short liaisons with friends
And long affairs, living with lovers,
Imagining it lasting forever
And battling the serious and inane.
Thinking everything will say the same.
And underlining all these times
Is the solidity of just one true love.

Finished November 14, 2021

She keeps songs
locked away in boxes
like secrets.
She will take them out
like postcards
to help her remember
the feeling of
a different time,
a different person
by her side.
She likes the one
that makes her
eyes close
to see the lights.
She smiles at
the one that  
makes her stand
up on tiptoes,
the one that
helps her forget
she doesn’t know
what to do
with her hands.

The tune
will carry her.

Like it did
the times when
voices broke
like a heart.
When instruments’ strings
would snap
and hurt.

DOWNPOUR

The rains came down in
The darkness before dawn.
Great thundering waterfalls
That beat tattoos on metal roofs
And sailed the gutter leaves like boats
In some fantastic competition
To make it to the storm drain first.

In this parched and arid state
It waked up sleepers with a start
Who rushed to roll up windows in the car.
And sent the teenaged paper boy
Rushing after plastic bags.
In thirty minutes it was gone
And you would never know it rained.

So thirsty is Nevada soil
That deluge never is enough.
The Monsoon didn’t come this year,
The floods all happened somewhere else,
And rocky landscape withers in the torrid sun
Trying to recall the **** feel
Of moisture seeping through its stones

And every drop is Holy Water.
ljm

What an exhausting year

My hungry heart torturing  
me with its violent desires

My trembling hands
aching for her warmth

My mind battling itself
trying to return from war

My depression,
a bloodthirsty dog,
and the nights keep coming

My soul, a wildfire
consuming everything,
leaving me with a lifetime of grief  

Yet I am still here
Shattered, but alive