Or so he said
The god of my youth
Was a haughty friend

Let your sorrow pool into
The gaping wounds
Of my stigmata
He proclaimed

What was left
Was nothing more
Than a watered-down
Bloodstain

Yet I sustained

Another two decades of fears

And while no longer friends
I attempt amends
Recollecting my tears
To ink the story
Of my years

Visions of Gideon
Bite your heels
As you flee

This is the mystery
Of love
A retreat

My name in
Your throat
A futile device

On repeat

To you,
Where your smile meets the gaze
Of blizzard-still byways -
I'm scared of losing you somewhere along the lines.

To you,
Buried barriers trickle moonflower skies
Two years apart from being miles away -
I'm scared we'll fall when it's too late.

To you, From me,
A friend who wishes the very least,
To spend a little more chapters in your life.
I'm scared we'll be over before we even start.

i do not sing the storm. i do not sing rage, wrath
the lightning bolt, the scream. Despair i do not sing
i do not sing struggle–revenge poisonous blast–
the hurricane, the quake that tears the city of peace

i do not sing no border. i do not sing no flag
i do not sing no warrior but she that fights all fear
Poverty & sickness-night, the blade, the club, the trap
blows, wounds, cries, lies, bursts & war-blood i do not sing

i do not sing despise for any thing or being
i do not praise no richness no governors, no kings
From all this flower-garden i pick one single rose:
creation is just dew upon the rose of love

i celebrate one flame. i only sing one blues:
the flame of endless loving with you & only you

pencil shavings and falling snow,
records on the phonograph
playing songs from a lifetime ago

my body, my heart, is sore
and the melancholy mutations
of my future force me to burrow

deep, deep into the familiarity of
razors and a phone that no longer
rings, because there's no one to call

october, my love, your comfort and
courage--your absolute devastation--
my soul lives forever in you--
all the years, the tears, the natural
ebb and flow of hope and heartache--
the bittersweet autumnal hymn of death
of warmth in the sun and cold everywhere else--
infinite dreams, romantic projections of the
necessities of a human heart--
incongruency of aesthetics so beautiful
they have to be true-- dancing through
recalcitrant golden sunbeams
of somewhere, somehow--

the first forces my hand
to these keys, to these cadences,
to the heartbreaking repetition
of melancholy moments--
the comfort I find in you is
intoxicating, illuminating,
my heartstrings are at your will as
the scenes of my life,
carved into old wood from the junction
by the grace of your hands;
precious in execution, precarious in practice,
persecuting my every thought and action;
yet my intention is pure in form:

i think that most of motherhood is the aching for that feeling;
the feeling of putting every single thing you are too small to fear
into a being that is nearly too small to love;
everything that is terrifying, everything that is menacing,
brought to light, literal light,
in your actual arms.

i am young and fertile and stupid I know.
but there's an ache, a breaking
inside of me, that is terrified
repulsed and jealous, at the thought of gaining
the inexplicable peace of the splitting of my soul
into myself and hope.

you speak in lullabies made of
tamborines, crashing, harmoniously
into the rocky shore of
that one night;
my sand paper scenes and silhouettes,
you painstakingly disintegrate and love.

the layers of this are complex
to the point where we don’t know
where things end and begin.
but your lion heart and hands feel solid
when most things only burn.

a city that sleeps,
that coos, that cries,
that holds me with no rain;
the tiptoe treasures
and my trying-too-hard-to-smile-eyes-
there is always time, always
reflection, always melancholy,
but I'm reminded that nothing
is always. because always always
ends. and everything always
always begins.