It used to hurt
to think about you
but now I smile
because I knew you
for a while

How to stay the same while changing

How to be the calm and the chaos

How to adventure far while staying close to home

How to love

How to be loved

How to fear while remaining blissfully unafraid

How to feel while showing nothing at all

How to be human

My troubles were
all shades of dark
and goodbye was
odorless

And he walked in
with a handful of incense
with the ease of transparency
in his eyes

you should know better than sacking hopeless places,
it is no glorious feat:
white hands,
erecting flags in the wounds of a pagan soil;
i wish i could've returned to dust right then.
white hands,
caressing softly the marks left by your whip
on my skin — now, a blank sheet,
wide open for your kisses;
but by now, your tongue should've known that
papercuts wound all the same.

my chest had been a burial place
for the nights i couldn't name;
and tonight,
my heart wants to leave behind
the very tomb —
the very body you seized for yourself —
the very host to your planted flags
and romanesque cathedrals
and brothels,
and tonight will be the crusades
for all these captured, lovely ashes
and all these captured, lovely bones.

and into the wind i'll be scattered.
and into the wind i'll go.
and honey, you may think you have won the war

but this is the song waiting in the taverns
that women will sing for you back home.

Abstract writing;
Using figurative words with no objective.
Writing streams of consciousness, that simply documents a perception of the now;
without ego or restraint.

(((Just write now, and make sense of it later;
It will always make sense when you give it a title.
(((A label)))((( A meaning)))

We were both writers.
You with a fountain pen and moleskin notebook  
I with anything I could scrawl on -tears always just at the edges of me
and in this way we began to author our life together.
We put pen to paper that first night
drunk on gas station liquor and on not feeling so alone.
Our hungry bodies filled page after page
with what I would come to believe
would be my magnum opus.

In your wedding vows you said that we would
“work together to fill the pages with
conflict, desire, pain and all that makes life real
so that we can appreciate all that makes life good”
You were not much of a co-author though
preferring instead to write alone at night while I slept
How many times did I revisit a previous chapter
only to find that you had introduced a new character
or a dark and bizarre plot twist without my knowledge?
Eventually these discoveries would become as predictable
as the indignant denials
eventual apologies
and promises that would always follow them

lather, rinse, repeat

Over years these edits and additions
would knock the air from my lungs
completely shaking my confidence as a writer.
With cramping hands I would try to rewrite the bad parts
though my scribble marks did little to mask the words beneath.
Words that once had flowed as easily and copiously as I had for you
now came only in fits and starts
each new chapter torn from the bones of my bones.
How many times did the ten eyes we wrote in
watch as writers block turned to writers rage
producing furious missives that would tear holes in pages without warning?
Still even as my teeth-torn hands turned arthritic
I couldn’t seem to just put down the ******* pen
Because it was our story
and because I loved it
and because I loved us
and because I loved you.

I ended our story with a semicolon
Its already faded form staring up from my ring finger
a reminder that I could have chosen to end my story but didn’t.
You once told me that a good author always employs irony
and I have always been a better writer than you’ve given me credit

                                                   ;

Dear fellow poets,

Try to vocalize
what you immortalize on paper.

Sincerely,
your courage.

Words drift, past the pages and recollection.
Some skip just above a stream of consciousness.
Others hurdle by, accelerating into shapelessness.

A fisherman of thought.
Praying the last of his bait,
feeds him, just another day.

As the days blend together,
and the current thrashes on,
hope is a face on the water.

He’s filled his belly with persistence,
but the need for creation lives on.

Cast the line.
Spin the rhyme.

Feast on the dreams of tomorrow.