not everything is beautiful

                                  (but you are)

Shampoo wends from my hair
riding rivulets down my face
and stinging my eyes.
The humid air is awash with
the smell of
coconut...
which I do not like.
But then again,
it’s not my shampoo.
When I moved back in with my parents and my
younger brother (aged 30)
I found the shower we once shared awash in
bottles.
His wife (forever 24) was one of those women who had
a bottle for everything.
Dry hair, frizzy hair, oily hair, big hair.
No hair.
A corpse doesn’t need conditioner and
After she took her life
she left her shampoo and now two years later
after moving back in with my parents
I wonder whether my brother ever moved on.
Does he shower with her ghost?
I do, when I use her shampoo
and it runs down my face and stings my eyes and smells like coconut.
Instead of talking to him I slowly attempt
to use up her memory,
so that he and I are no longer awash in it
whenever we shower
and we can move forward.
But then,
inevitably,
as the shampoo runs thin
and my eyes are rinsed clean
I wonder:
If he followed her into the dark,
how long would I keep his bottles
as daily I tried to clean myself
while simultaneously
awash in their ghosts?

Have I truly lost myself?
My humanity, my grace?
And if I am truly lost then can I find me in this place?

Or have I truly found myself?
My passion, hope, and jest?
And if I am truly found then should I lay my head and rest?

Or should I yet push forward
into the ever-shifting mists,
forget whether to be lost or found and simply just exist.

I resist (you or anyone)
sitting next to me on the train.
Passengers come and go,
yet you remain.
The time-lapse highlights
our unchanging positions.
Then it is your stop
and now suddenly I feel very

alone.

The fog scatters the light and my thoughts.
Dissembling what I deigned to build.
Through the mists, a mass of mountain,
and what do I amass, a man?
Sometimes trickle, sometimes fountain,
Alas, and I without a dam.

Life tastes of old bread and long-opened chips.
A haggard breath hanging in the heat.
A swollen tongue lolling and sticking to the roof of your mouth
getting in the way of lazy words that seek to dash the doldrums.
Sometimes the gaze of life is piercing and sometimes (now)
it is donut holes iced over and left out overnight
and then left out overnight again.
The muted voice of an underwater murmurer muttering
into cotton-filled ears something half-hearted and uninteresting.
Life is umami for dessert after a gluttonous feast
and never have I so craved the bright citrus peal
of an orange.

The Gloaming

The flames licked my feet,
I smiled.
The tickle was fleeting, the burn for awhile;
the memory lasts longest,
still here to this day,
long after the scars have faded away.
In the gloaming thereafter
I’ve traveled alone,
avoiding the fire and ash that it's sown.
Though I once played with flames,
though once I was hurt,
still the nip of the night bears no pretense of comfort.