perfume samples at the airport
lukewarm bite-size samples at Costco
the first chapter of an ebook.

a whiff, a taste, a peek.

do you want more?
will you commit to buying the full product?
or will you keep searching?
chasing? craving?

it seems to be inexplicably conditional -
for some, you’ll stop dead in your tracks,
knowing to stock up.
for many, you’ll move on,
forgetting you ever halted to try it.

but maybe you’ll remember how it felt,
deep-down it resonated with you,
and it’ll affect your other future decisions.

what makes us fall in love?
what makes us tether,
souls tied,
minds aligned,
keep choosing to fall with each other?

Circumstances are hinges
Where poetry swings.
They can open a door
To a million linguistic expressions
Or they can shut them off
**** them in the sore of your throat
But never mute the meaning of.
Meaning lays in the very state
Of furtiveness and nakedness
From which words, inner or external
Emerge.
When mine merge with yours
It's beautiful
But when feelings do
As ore as they can get
There is not a word
Left to say.


-- Eleanor

tick tock
rhymes with clock
and sunrise
with goodbyes
know
to go
and flow
and so
By and fly
and cry
but while heart
pairs with start
nothing, not one thing
rhymes with orange.
Poor orange.

Expensive handbags,
Pensive listening,
Nothing I say is ever worth
Mentioning.
Swing on this
Hinge-- a see-saw of
Heartache
Bruised on the *** by
The frozen snake--
Never to thaw
And never to break.
Exquisite lampshades
Hide the luminous
Color,
Now a dingy
Dim of disrepair
Order.
Visit a fairytale
Where honey flows in
Waterfalls,
The smooth will soothe the
Heartless work and
Falls.
Tangled cloth again today,
Moth eaten and angled,
We ride in the dark
Convinced our little playground could save
A heart.

I am never more human
than when I’m riding next to someone
who makes me shudder.
I am human as I sit and I wonder about their life
the way their hair curls to the left instead of the right,
if it was on purpose or done with curlers, or if everything in life is just accidental.
She probably didn’t care which way her hair curled. Neither do I. But I do care
about the way her ankles look with them crossed, about the way her eyes are angled
out the window, about the way her jaw clenches when we hit a bump. It probably clenches
the same way when her boyfriend is ******* her.
I sit on the bus, shuddering and wondering about the bus riders’ lives. They’re probably the same
as mine, as yours, as the guy’s who is behind me, digging his knees
into the green leather of my seat, which is cracking at the edges. I see a piece
of yellow foam pushing out the edge, and I cannot resist the urge to play with it.
The person who sat here before me probably did, too. We cannot help but play with things,
always hoping we’re never the one to finally break it.
We are all the same, we all live to love, or love to live,
or maybe we don’t,
but we take comfort in knowing that we will all die one day
whether its on purpose or by accident, though it is always accidental.
But maybe we really are different, after all,
we’ve come a long way, from discovering fire to discovering better ways to put it out,
concocting new chemicals to cure every ailment,
fabricated or organic, physical or mental,
and I cannot get out of my mind that
our minds revolve around the world which revolves around the stars,
the ones in the theaters and the ones in the skies, the ones on the covers of magazines
like People and Science Weekly—inside they’re half advertisements—
how else do we advance in the world without cash?
Their covers are full of sequins and *** tips and shuttles with surveillance
cameras snapping photos as they watch our every move
from behind the cover of the planets who grin with the knowledge they will never reveal,
because they, too, are plotting against us.
Tonight we are under the cover of the blankets and I am watching her just as we are watched by
the planets that spin and the stars that shine and the moon that just wants to see the light of day
because she only knows the dark of night,
and the eclipse of her *******
eclipses the eclipse of the moon,
and the cross around her neck is blinding me with reflected light and reflected values
and I can’t look away but I can’t look at it
because I want to deny it but I want to accept it and
I marvel at how one taste of her
can show me what it is like to be saved.