Forgetting is the only clarity.*

It was a day of forgetting.
No unquiet dreams or
casual reunions with the dead
who wander the halls of sleep,
the bodies of someone else’s loss.
No ghosts in the gazebo.
No echoes in the fading light.

Exiting sleep’s empty waiting room,
She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
There was writing on the wall.
Old fragments came to closure.
The windows slowly turned to mirrors.

She fiddled. She soared.  
She played with her ancestors’ building blocks.
She lent a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moment froze.
Then there it was.
The compound inviolate paradox
at the heart of things,
the answer flickering in light and shade,
to the sound of a child’s voice,
then the roaring wind.
She chuckled as it faded to a point of light
then vanished, like the picture on an old TV,
Like the moon shrinking into the alarm clock’s face.

Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in this inviolable disconnection,
the clear cold innocence of now.

We are a part of everything
And everything is a part of us
Don't sleep
Just dream
Close your eyes when you kiss

You're the sun.

So beautifully bright that I have to stare, even though it hurts horribly.

I live in Antarctica, where you only light up my world half of the time and then leave me to suffocate in darkness for months on end.



You're a deer.

Unaware of me observing your adroitness from the dark depths of this brazen bracken which conceals me.

If I make any sort of sudden movement, I know you will sprint away into the trees because you're so afraid of letting anyone get close to you.



You're a puppetmaster.

Pulling at my oh-so-vulnerable heartstrings in the most musical way while creating the most fantastic and addictive art.

Your fingers are magic to me, and their slightest movement can either plunge me into endless despair or **** me up to the most heavenly of all cloud nines.



You're a siren.

Drawing me in with your sweet song only to ultimately unravel me.

You taunt me with colorful hints of false hope, making me wonder if you're really that cruel, or if you're merely  unstable.



You're a child.

So oblivious to the obvious, yet incredibly innocent.

You brighten my day with your silly antics and sweet gestures alike, but you're too enthralled in your own little world to ever notice.



You're Doctor Jekyll.

Always changing your face from friendly to arrogant and asinine, then right back again.

Sometimes I wonder how I could love someone like Mister Hyde, until you turn into the nice guy again and remind me.



You're a weaver.

Excruciatingly twisting the threads of me into the fabric of my being, leaving little streaks of sorrow and joy.

You have shaped this tapestry in the most painful and beautiful way, and without your unknowing influence, it would surely be unrecognizable from its current battered, but unique, condition.





You're a thorny rose I keep trying to pick.



Sending me away ******, bleary-eyed, and smelling sweet.



I wish you could understand how much I need to carry you home.

“Up above my head
I hear music in the air
I really do believe
I really do believe
there's a Heaven somewhere”
--Rhiannon Giddens

“Is that all there is?”
--Peggy Lee*

An old philosopher told me this:

“About heaven.
Let’s say there’s more than one.
There’s the one where souls
are lurid with perfection,
piled into bliss,
dreaming of change.

“There’s the one people search for
to fit the story they tell themselves.
I looked for it.  I watched the sky.
I found only words.  Blue sky is
a blank page.  Clouds are garish metaphors.

“Then there’s one that follows you.
Don’t look for it. You can’t find it.
It’s not a place or a path.
It dances at the edge of things
like old photos or a young face
that lives remembered in its older one,
an eternal moment always at hand
trailing like a thought balloon,
a shadow cast by nothing,
forever unfolding, never now.”

You drew blood and I called it paint
As though these veins hold art
And you were creating a masterpiece
To be hung up in my heart

he only thinks you're
pretty when you cry
when the aching
vulnerabilities sting
like red welts along
cheeks that are
white as teeth
only then are you pretty,
when the red blood
tears fall like soldiers in
the war of peace and
he kisses the place the
bullet exits
he promises he will
still love you as the lion
that murders the lamb
when the sky bleeds,
crimson echoes down
mountains of death
his viper hands
snake round your
hips and you just
don't mind, you just
don't mind anymore