City WITHOUT houses
Cars WITHOUT complaint
People WITHOUT patience
Buildings WITHOUT paint
Portland ISN'T pretty
NO ONE likes it here
LOST its charm already
That's why they all DRINK beer

This is a soul wrecking
Flesh eating
Gut wrenching pain
Never to see you
Or touch you
Or hear you say my name
This is a heart breaking
Unending
Soul ******* pain

Barcode trees and sticky leaves
Blue skies like your candy eyes mountainous vertebrae
Spine of the earth
Finally giving birth
To the sea

The earths wet open mouth
Spindly coral teeth
Immortal lunch
Swimming about
And then crunch

Sometimes
I look up at the moon and pretend
that you're looking up too, smiling back
at me, like nothing ever changed.

- that you still only remember the good
and laugh at the funny, your aftershave
lingering on my sweater after
you pulled away

- that you'd still brush the crumbs from your lap
of the cookie we shared,
bathing in the morning sunlight
of the park the quiet morning,
telling stories that
mingled with the rays

- that you look back at the drafts of
the letters you wrote me,
six neon pages of painstakingly
handwritten loops, and remember my
giggles when I had read the letter
a hundred miles away but hearing your voice
so closely in my ear, whispering
each word

Tonight the moon is no different -
He doesn't know how things have changed.
But I do, and yet I pretend,
staring intently up into the night sky,
like nothing ever changed.

I wish
     that each day would
     pass faster
            so that we’d watch a collection
            of sunrises and sunsets,
            hurtling towards things unseen –
            shadows of temptation and dreams
            extending tendrils     (there’s hope!)

            I watch the clouds during
            the day and the stars at
            night and wish I could
            one day
            fly among them
            (instead I sit on the floor
            under my window, feet
            tucked under, and watch, thinking
            of roads that lead to dead ends
            and those that lead to forks
            (and the split roads and split thoughts
            and all things that lead to divides called
            options.))

But yet –
at the same time,
I wish
     that each day would
     pass more slowly
            taking time to trace each
            dizzying circle and elliptical,
            numbers that leave me behind
            in lessons unheard –

            because for numbers, some stories
            end, and some never end,
            infinities that stretch beyond
            paper lines and minds alike,
            and maybe we all fall in
            someplace within the stories of numbers.

            At night the wind picks up
            in shrieking wails, and the
            little voices creep in, wondering if
            the day had been used up
            like each drop of sunlight
            had been worth it, the darkness
            squeezing out the
            value of it all –

and maybe then the room will stop spinning.

Little girl, where did you go?

2. With your pinned-back baby hairs
3. and your untouched eyes, clear from the smudges of life. 

4. Where’d you go?

5. Did you run off and hide the first time daddy threw a beer bottle against the wall?

6. Was it the noises, the smash of glass against drywall, the shriek you didn’t recognize until you closed your own mouth? 

7. Little girl, are you hiding? 
Please stop hiding. 

8. Little girl tell me, did your mothers cigarette smoke fog your view of happiness ? 

9. Did the ashes coat your eyelashes so thick that all you could see was darkness?
10. Tell me, little girl, are you afraid of the dark?

11. Or was it the night you watched your father fall out of love?

12. With mom, with you,
with life?

13. Little girl, tell me, did you fill a balloon with your insecurities?

14. Did you tie around your wrists a little too tight and it’s been awhile since you’ve even tried taking it off? 

15. Are the marks on your arms from nights when it got a little too windy, and you were a little too high up? 

16. Little girl, how did it feel to be caught in a storm?

17. Are you still up there darling?

18. Are you ever coming down?
Little girl please come down.

19. Baby girl, let me tie rocks to your ankles, place pillows where you’ll land, will you let me catch you?

20. Darling please let me catch you.

When I sleep in my room alone in my bed,
I lay with my back to the wall,
because an inch out is the edge, and be it hardwood
floors or knotted cedar trees the dark
permeates the room.  
There's nothing there, but I can never bring myself to
put my back to the unknown blindness beyond
my bed.
But when you sleep next to me in our twin bed, your feet warm next
to mine and more than half the blanket bunched under-
neath your chest;
when your drooling wets the pillow we share and
your warm breath tickles my nose,
I face the wall. I face you.