Waiting for you was the toughest thing to do,
But not knowing whether you'd come back
was even harder.

Under a tree,
Await rain to stop.

I
See a flower
Defy rain,
Struck by drops,
Liable to die.

When I hesitate,
She falls, beheaded,
So beautifully, in
So ominous rain.
Even while falling,
She never yields.

Now, leaves fall
Above my head.

I regret.
Should’ve helped.
Here remains only
This wet, cowardly flesh.

I
See this bud
Defy rain
Even when dead.

apparently i wear my hesitation
my measured self control
in bold streaks of watercolors
across the pulled canvas of my face
but somehow that tension
the taut bounce of my shallow panorama
slides thinly by your
probing eyes poking at my weak spots
and waiting to watch me
shatter

search me
put the hidden words in quotations marks
and hit the return key
to query the google of my mind
whose only existence to you
is a retreating shadow
running past the wind
with a sonic boom of silence

it's easier to find something
when you have an idea where to look
and my subversive games
of smoke and mirrors
throwing my voice to a
different part of my body
the elegant distraction and the
final solution to my
nebulous existence
as a paper doll girl whose
amorphous two dimensional body
wears whatever
diaphanous primary color frock
the world demands to keep
it turning without hiccup
a sacrifice to the gods i have
foresaken and blasphemed
whose names i've taken in vain
and cursed with the most excruciating
fervor and
resolution

i want peace
which does not in fact live
in placating distraction
or hand waving while i'm
hemorrhaging from the
butchered wound in
my abdomen out of which
my secret shame seeks
to excrete that pheromone that
warns approaching creatures
that i am still
a wounded animal and
could snap at any moment
see red
then nothing

you can only help
a person so much when
every time they run
to your waiting arms
bleeding and broken
begging for absolution
or perhaps simply an
intercession for their muteness
and sutures of salvation
how do you help a person
who stands from the alter
with the transcendent certainty of
a religious experience
and yet still
pulls out those black wire stitches
while passing the last of the
empty pews
and the flickering flames
sending prayers up to an
empty firmament

i am the headlights on
the cars that follow in
solemn silence behind
the police escort
and the hearse
from church to finality
and a place in this world for eternity
a hole just my own
where peace is blackness of nothing
and the endless chatter
the bile whose acid
eats away at my brain
dries up and in its dessication
flies away in the arid winds
of terminal acceptance

you say you want the truth
but you're not like me
and you can't hide the pain
when i
hiding my fear
tell you that i need you
to leave
when all i want
is to keep your body pressed
infinitely close to mine
world without end
but my words fight to hold
the front line
and my canvas face is pulled
that much tighter.

Standing on the edge of uncertainty

She stares down at what’s to come

Her breath is caught by indecision

As she looks on she finds the fear of the future

But when she looks back she knows her past is gone

So she closes her and dives into

The unsteady waves that consume her

If I could press each thought I've spoken
into a dandelion head
and if 'promise' weren't a word,
then I'd promise you that I would.
Still, somehow I almost do with the look I just gave you.
But no sound is a word I could just leave there behind me.
Imagine this tugging,
I feel it
like tassels on a shadow moving across the floor.
Sometimes I can feel them dragging
there and exposed to the places I pass through.
But somehow they blend me
into the surface of this world.
And so I let them do it,
Blur my rigid outline
just to make me something more
than this shape your eyes have given me.

I read my poems over and over,
become convinced that my heart is bipolar.
Find me laid out on the four corners
my limbs in each state-
picking a new place
to escape you and my fate.
But if you were to go- you'd probably
get a phone call from New York
saying you just missed the funeral.

If I called a psychic hotline,
could the disembodied voice
on the other end of the line
give me some secret to my future?

Or should I try the palm readers
so ubiquitous throughout
the seedier parts of town late at night?
Maybe they can read the clues
sketched onto my hands
and point me in the direction
of the path I'm meant to be on.

Can I find a crystal ball gazer
and have her look deep
into the swirling mists of myself?
Tell me ma'am, am I doing
anything at all right?

I suppose I'm meant to be content
wandering aimlessly along,
with no one to whisper
secrets in my ear as I go.  
But tell me ma'am,
does it drive everyone
as mad as it's driving me?