i won't pretend i'm fluent in remembering
but maybe if you put me through some
stretch of missingness
i'd forget why i'm alone.
i could fight to end up in your head again
but it wouldn't last for long, unless
you started to want what i got.

but if we're gonna do this, you better
stop breathing like that
i want to bury my heart at the sound of you
tell it to sink a ways away
so i don't have to ask you in its morse code moan
do you lo...... never mind, it wouldn't have rhymed anyway.

i have a friend who said don't hate yourself
if they want someone else
but we don't ever listen to ourselves, so
maybe that's why i ****** in a withheld farewell.
i don't know where you've been
or who you've been
or who you've been with
but if you asked me to i'd be there soon
i could be fluent in misremembering, but
excuse me for asking, voice trembling, noise severing
but i'd ask you to please pick up the phone
if it meant anything close to bettering
the crooked tangled ways the wrong roots went in deep grown.

Under a big tent
Topped with stars and
Smelling of elephants
A couple of daredevils
Toss in their trailer
Restless in the Midwest

Their golden suits shimmer
In the Iowa half light
The cornstalks talk in
The breezes passing by
At night the daredevils whisper
About what it would be like to really fly
And not just on the trapeze
They kiss goodnight and dream of impossibilities

Times are changing
Since the war it's been mostly women
In the crowds the circus draws
They scream at the lions
Roar at the strongman
Gasp and applaud the two daredevils
Enthusiastically
Happily
Making love in the sky

Times are changing
Since his number came up
She's been lonely
Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri
Her gold suit is covered in farm dust
Growing nothing much
Her husband is on a bombing raid over Nazis
He's finally flying
Helped by an airplane
B52s and bloodshot eyes
No longer dreaming of impossibilities but
Missing his safety net

Since he left she's been thinking about cannons
Popcorn, scrap metal
and hoping against solo acts
She's been dreaming of
What it's like to be shot at
Really take risks
Really feel out of breath
And her husband's been writing her letters
About white picket fences

"The daredevil life that we wanted is so much worse than we thought it would be. Let that sweet silent net catch you and lie quietly thinking of me."

Times are changing
And so is he
Times are changing
And she feels like world shaking
She can hear the wolves blowing it down

But she keeps up her stunts
And keeps up her spirits
Till one day the bearded lady is screaming
Her name from the floor of the tent
Up on that tightrope she pauses
A second
There's two grim faced servicemen
Her daredevil husband is dead
Flying a mission over Dresden
Just another casualty of a world at war
Another daredevil in a dogfight and
Now one less mouth for the circus to feed

Suddenly she's high up in the stratosphere
Breathing fumes
And from the tightrope she faints
I've given him my heart, given him my onliness
She rests in her gold suit
Cradled by the safety net he warned her to hang on to
And in her dreams she can't help thinking
Maybe she dodged a suburban bullet

Times have changed
And since the war's end
The leftover men
Have gotten married
And she's been doing nothing
But lying awake in her bed
Thinking
Picturing cannons mauling
White picket fences
Her body in a gold suit
Broken on the green grass
She needs distance and airtime
To cull this restlessness
Get out of the Midwest
**** his conspicuous missingness
And come up with a solo act
To keep her fed

In the morning she finds the ringmaster
Hungover in the hay of the elephant stalls
In the morning she's made a decision
To fly like a cannonball
Through a dreamland
Times are changing
And since she woke up
She's dressed in her gold suit
Setting fire to the average
Dreaming of impossibilities

A furious 'thud-thud, thud-thud' hammers my bones
as I whip shirt sleeves and scarves across my room
and into the small latch-lock box.
The one with the brown leather handle that smells
like things-so-old-they've-turned-to-air.
Long ago I lost the key but the shape of its missingness
is the most familiar thing left in this place.
Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life.



My footsteps ricochet off the walls to the toc-toc of the witching hour.
I hail a cab and lament the bouncy back seat and pop tunes of the humming driver,
pay with an app so I don’t have to say goodbye.
Not to cab, not to town, not to room.
The high-pitched wails of the most popular human carting system
grates my melancholy between the tracks.
Claustrophobic, crammed into more boxes
I.
Hate!
Boxes.

I…
Can’t remember how I got here from there.
I sit at the airport waiting for a canceled seat so I can get the next flight to:

Anywhere, Extra Cheap.
I look at a clock and I shouldn’t have.

Footsteps haunting, tracks grating, bumping, wailing, mouth humming slow to a blur.
The family next to me carefully removing themselves from the smell of my suitcase.

“Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life,” I tell them.

At last the healing heart has evoked the curiosity based upon its likeableness for uniqueness which has strengthened the stimulant for doing a pioneering work.

I feel the auroras coursing down my heart and tracing your name in all the captured minim parts.

Although I am thoroughly ensconced by being a lover of a fine art,
But I yearn to feel
the motivation in the amateur part.

This perseverance has a rosy wreathe,
It is present only to experience your brilliant lambency because it lends me the safety for journeying my long-lasting delving quest.

-Shivpriya
#shivpoetesspriya

Fraught to conceal a grim incomprehension; the chaos in my soul
Transpsrancy through shadows lead the way back home
Who am I if not for you?
Displacing this floating intensity
A missingness of my former orbit takes hold of me
Only you can console this immense deformity, in me
Forcibly, my flame
Faintly say my name

I am content