Inside this box are but three things
--a ruler, a boxing glove, and kite string.

Because I never could keep my sordid
life straight.

Because I never did learn to fight my
own battles.

Because I never will soar as high as my smallest dream.

Why do I have them in the first place,
you might ask?

I just love reminiscing.
I'm a sucker for nostalgia,
even if it's over my own failings.

That my first love was the perfect blue eyed, blond haired cherub is the error of my socialization, proved by the stained yellow of my newly-dulled canines and how there’s ****** pestilence we know and deny that I‘ve come to love
All the rot
And the “Memento Moris”
Because they are all the stuff that I imagine makes the color of her grotesque foot, pressed plainly to my spine like to any ladybug she would’ve otherwise made Love to.
So you may understand that the most attractive thing in the world would be to see her undone.

I won’t say this isn’t perverse for Love.
I love her so much I can despise who she’s become, her skull, a tomb robbed of fresh thought, her gems scraped off like scabs to decorate a destitute grapevine, then plucked and fed to the Noble she owes her fair hair.

“Circumstance. There’s only circumstance to blame.” I once cried about it, my lips craving only to move in tandem again with hers. So parroting was the next best thing.
Until I crushed peaches to try and be rid of her, which is why my ***** tastes of them every time now.

I recall crow’s feet, pressed to my groin, apropos of all I didn’t escape.
So I say, “I adore you” to My Emetophobic Girlfriend to be safe, so Love can stay reserved for the fantasy,
Where “silver lining” is less often the sole, desperately perceived pretty glint offered by the carving knife, since buried in bleeding beef, the raw nerves chastened by death... or anything else so depressing.

My first love became a neutered pet,
Gutted of her Love for me by her best friend’s fishknife fingernails and steel-eyed judgement, instructed, “Be Better.”

She told me things she’d never told anyone,
Then told me, “Remember me as you wish.”
So I cling to the fleeting memory of her perfume, yet am haunted nonetheless by her last words.

I miss the days of not caring,
I miss those happy nights,
but most of all I miss you
smiling under the starlight.

childish, shattered blue pottery
rivers and a diversity of children.
to each, their broad shirts and scribbles
for heads, mouths, faces, arms.
winking at me about heaven or nirvana or both. more.
they seem wiser.
i heard that all time is occurring at once.
looking here, i see it all as reflection.
the bright infant depictions hand everything back to me as if to say-
this was this wall. this, was where you sat
and looked into it and laughed your little laugh. see? then all the leftovers-
so soggy, how they dripped off the cheap white plastic. so sad, how
you lived, some others died.
they hand me the truth like their homemade bread in the linen
(this is my body...)

joy, like anything, is born to fragments made more whole.
place your thumb on the ones with the silly chipped paint and buried toddlers’ finger nails,
and remember how both happen all at once.
like a cough.
like a child (yours) letting go of life and then the pillowcase.
like rain and the fireworks.
like all the ways how you can collect someone in your arms and speak to them
about this moment.

here is a construct.
make into a home.

after all, there is so little time.
the children meet at the hands to make a circle. everything all at once.
a pacifism of crayon box hues.
they each confide that they’re the end, the middle, and the beginning.
and one after another,
like green blips on the panels
like god and a pulse, those pyrrhic, incandescent blues
then breakage-
I close my eyes to believe them.
(do this in remembrance of me)

I have tried to forget you
on numerous days
and in numerous ways.

But you say invariably,
"I am yours, sincerely".

And I search yet again
for the vestigial chains
that bind you and me.

I think of you;
and your fascinated face
peeps artlessly through
the haze of a former age:
Oh! those inaugural, elegant days.

I look up.....
expectantly, readily.......

A hesitant keenness surges......
timidly, momentarily,
then bleeds away briskly, desolately
..........mortally.

Just a few fossils abide:
Some frosty images
and evaporating voices,
......sobbing quietly
through the nasty silence
of the night

In the midst of each moment, I looked up to you
I tried to make you believe, that you’re among the chosen few
What is it I wonder? Is there something I did?
Or was it something I said?
Please swallow the pride you hold, and tell me what wrong I did?
Remember, when you looked out the window, and found me looking at you
You might have wondered, what is it that dragged me to you
I tell you now, that it wasn’t the shadow you casted
It wasn’t your pretty face, nor was it your cute smile
O hear me my dear, I tell you the secret now
It was your eyes that did the magic
It was your eyes, which jolted my soul
It was your eyes, that gave me a glimpse of the paradise
It felt like a ray, penetrating the cage I lived by
It was oxygen to a man about to die
I saw HOPE in those eyes, a hope to live by
Hey, tell me this?
Was the journey we had so bad, that you didn’t even wait to say goodbye

Remember the first time, when your lips touched mine under those million twinkling lights
It seemed like a dream, but was the dream just mine?
The birds singing the songs of love, tell me that you didn’t hear those.
Tell me, did you not hear the whispers of the cold air?
The whispers that said it’s all too true and real
I felt like I was in heaven, but was it not true for you?
How can you push me away, after everything we’ve been through?
I try to write about you, but I wonder, were you ever mine to write about
Well now, the more I write about you, the more I drown myself
The more I think about you, the deeper I hurt myself
The ink runs dry now, just like my trust and belief
It was just yesterday, but it seems a million years have gone by
Hey, tell me this?
Was the journey we had so bad, that you didn’t even wait to say goodbye

Love, given over to stone,
Encoffinated warmth of sun,
Shielded from the prickled infiltrations
Of a many-menaced world.
But here we live too with porous beauty,
Here we kneel with bulwark of shoulders,
Then fall without a twitch to the wind.

For whatever it is worth...
_____

Once upon a time
I came upon a flute;
chic, delicate and fine -
fashioned impeccably
from exceptionally fine wood
hauled discreetly
from the flourishing forest
of fumbling youth.

‘twas just one of its kind.

A surrogate to which
you would never truly find.

One scale at a time
one throb at a rhyme;
its notes ripened into
mesmeric, beatific rhymes.

✽

The day was Wednesday
and December was the month.
My fingers had gone all numb.

Aquiver...

I held the flute nimbly -
the dew on my vernal lips
caressing it gently,
when the clasp came undone
and the comely flute
split in two
or maybe five or seven.

The tally is incidental
but the occasion,
for sure,
was nineteen eighty seven.

A proxy I could never find.
‘twas just one of its kind.

✽

Just this verse remains
like a tease that dwells
amidst lost reminders
of contiguous yonder.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
Though grandfathers hold back the darkened thrall,
The half-flit coven of breezes and icy vine that sprawls,
Until the black worms away at them and they grab hold
Of the language of death like a locket over their hearts.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
In spite of the keepsake of hoarders, fathered by fathers old.
Death’s single-worded world speaks; the chain of old men folds,
Kingdom’s pawns, their broken tongues lie bleeding with sun,
The black fluency slips through, then childhood falls as one.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
There is one who played with us in sunlight
Who sits between the ancient legs and watches us
Like a friend from a window who is too sick to play.  
Old men, soon to your rest, and I will let death
Carve its name on my shoulders while my spirit frays.