It seemed the space between us became torn and
Profoundly distanced....................

Jamming bony knuckles and spread eagled fingers,
Lying their mapped out journey.....direction on point patrol....
Adorned by silver decoration, delighting in their skinned habitat
Shafted, deceit punching the recipient of the poison digits
Prodding and pushing their intent....dare you contradict
The intended carved out dose of punishment, Risk and
Safety......not yours and never would be; stooped
Down under the assailing bony palmed attachements
That delivered penetrating power, cupped around
Your arm til it became discoloured, pressure points
Backed you into a corner, up against the grain of the
Brick wall, cold and damp, the odour reaching
And scolding your nostrils with its stale internal vows
Refuse, stretching and protruding its foul remnents
An earlier life, when you were not under threat fades
Your very existance in jeopardy, your eyes pleaded for
Normality, willing someone to hear your silence, grip you
Tightly, not with malice, but with bravery and valour
Right now you need that shining knight, that white
Horse galloping down the blind alleyway, yet you
Know that won't happen for you're already sinking
To the floor, the blow comes sharp and stings, warmth
Exudes and trickles a path downwards, leaving your
Body, finding the cold concrete beneath you, travelling
Outwards................

Within creased paper lie binded souls
Firmly held within my clutch ,
Ideology hemorrhaging as non-opposables only bend so much.
Thirsty i reached for a swig of your cup 
Open palmed 
This vessel mishandled 
the contents soaked through bedrock
Its remains a drink for the decrepit.

A hippie hocked a louie on Sammy
when he landed in San Francisco.

Sammy didn't respond;
he just wanted to make
his connecting flight home.

Sammy wasn't proud about
some of things he did in the war;
so he figured he probably
deserved the garlands of disdain
an ungrateful nation bestows
upon itself in fits of self contempt.

Sammy shut down and tuned out,
soon his heart was as dead
as a tombstone until he visited
the monument.  

He would often recall the story
that as he approached the darkened
wall he could sense ghosts loosening
themselves from the black granite.   

Sammy swore that Jimmy Lynch
who went MIA on the final week of his tour
gave him a bear hug and told him
as long as the beer stays cold
and he don’t lose the church key,
everything's groovy and he’s
hanging tough until the rest
of the guys show up.

Jimmy pointed to the Lincoln Memorial
at one end of the mall and to the
Washington Monument at the other,
emphatically stating that our monument
was forever linked with the greatest Americans.

Yeah meeting up with Jimmy
helped Sammy to start shaken
off some real bad stuff.

Mazie knew her husband for a
month before they got married.
A week later Freddie was off to Vietnam.

Freddie was KIA during the Tet Offensive
and his repatriated remains are peacefully
at rest in the red clay of Georgia.

An always faithful Mazie
came to the monument
a few years after it was dedicated.  
She was struck by all the keepsakes
people left at the base of the wall;  
Zippos, baby pictures, a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye, a fifth
of Makers Mark, Pink Teddy Bears,
votive lights, a red 57 Chevy model,
a left handed catchers mitt, and
a pack of Lucky Strikes.

She palmed rosaries and
crucifixes that salved sore
running wounds and David’s
interlaced Star sounding a Shofar
pleading a case for peace.

Mazie is most moved by the names.  
Rows and rows of names. The scroll
begins in a modest manner and
as the wall climbs the names
of a country's vigilant sons and
daughters tower over her head.  
So much living history; spoken
in the unique accent of a country’s
diverse plethora of luminous tongues.

The stories written into the black granite
tell a tale from every state; claiming
the ears, heart and mind of every citizen. 
Each chiseled letter captures every bit
of sun and deep creeping shadow
inching across a great nation.

“I’m  71” says Mazie.  “When I look
upon the wall I see my 21 year old
Freddie as he looked on the finest
day of his life.  He will never look
any other way to me.”
  
“I didn't want to go to see it,” Franny said,
“a cold piece of stone won’t bring my son back.”

Franny did finally go...

When it rains the wall weeps.  
The wall wept all day,
the first time Franny went.

Many were rubbing
the impressions of
dearly departed names.

Franny too, kneels to the
presence of her son’s name.

With a mother's
grateful fingers,
she touches the wall's
damp surface; wiping
the drizzle from her
child's sodden face.

Kneeling before his semblance,
she rubs his etched edges
onto tiny bits of paper.

She sees him,
made manifest in the stone.
As if through a glass darkly,
a found son looks back,
onto the face of a caring mother.

Franny hangs onto the quiet
memory of his voice,
shimmering in the soft lilt
of a warm dark stone.

This deep core Vulcan gneiss,
at last emerged from the hardest stuff,
sculpts a perfect likeness of a tear stained nation.

The Harmonizing Four: Rock of Ages

In Honor of
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Washington DC

Oakland
Veterans Day
2013

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

Since I have no other way
And am in utmost need,
Painter girl,
I filch one of the eight lambs
You have made plump with
Green jackfruit leaves and
Thin gruel with paddy bran.

I will take it to the goat market
And sell it in a jiffy.

I assure you
I will not sell it
To any butcher-
The lamb you made chubby
With sweet sweet words
And much much petting
And nice lilting croons,
Mixing and mixing
Greens with browns.


Don’t be sad, painter girl.
I hear you come running
Searching for your lamb and
Cry out “O my dearest one
Who went grazing in the green fields,”
As the sun in your canvas
Sets in the sea and
The saffron blends with the dusk.
And, see your tears mingle
With the black that you wanted
To adorn the brow of
The naughtiest of them.

Painter girl,
It’s all because I have no other go
And it’s of utmost need.
I could have broken into the
Two-storeyedhouse you sketched
And stolen the ornaments in
Secret lockers that even
You are unaware of.

Or, I could have
Palmed the golden girdle
Of the beautiful ***** princess
Whose portrait you made,
The one with a nose stud.
Or, drugged her with my kisses
And plundered the harem.

Or else, I could have
Entered the snake shrine
Guarded by the dark serpents
That you often drew
And fled the country with
The precious jewel.

Or, I could have shot down
The birds that you drew
And sold them grilled.

I could have axed down the
Mahagony trees you nurtured
And sold them as timber.
I could have blinded your Kanhaiah
And made him a beggar
To become rich from the alms he earned.
I could have enslavened his Gopis
And handed them over
To the red light streets.

Painter girl,
It’s not for anything of this sort.
I take just one of your eight lambs.
Sell it for a good price
And fulfill my need.

Now, perchance,
If a new tenant comes to rent
My brain where nothing resides
And if they pay me a fat advance,
Painter girl,
Surely will I buy back your lamb.
And tether it in your painting.
Don’t you dare say then
Don’t you say then
That you have forgotten it.
Don’t you say then
You have exhausted your stock of
Green jackfruit leaves.


(Trans from Malayalam by Ra Sh)

No more lords.
No more rules.
Dictated by cloud headed fools.
Dogmatic commands issued
from chairs in the sky.
Telling those without wings:
How we cannot live,
And terms when we die

Speaking endless promises
yet speaking in riddles,
circles, and lies.

Life is a game
Of slicked palmed
councils on clouds

Telling us,
Work hard enough!
Aspire high enough!
And you can earn your wings
(of feathers and wax)
All your hard work
Will be rewarded at last!

So, work hard today
and pay us our taxes.
Perhaps tomorrow,
you get your wings.

All lies.
We toil today.
We toil tomorrow.
We toil until our loved ones
Gather in shared sorrow.
Buried with unfulfilled dreams
Of flying
Tomorrow.

Black eyes,
Deep and endless.
Shines a light,
Bright and timeless.

A kind smile,
On a gnarled face.
Handsome in his
own way.

Honesty.
A lost virtue,
In this wasteland
We call home.

Smoke drifts
from a parted mouth.
Escapes into the
nothingness of the
green-tinged sky.

"Moments like these,
I know all that karma
stuff is all bull."

Those are your words.
Not mine.

"Because no one like me,
should be this lucky."

There is no one like you.

A man out of time,
in stolen red duds.
tricorn hat tipped
to the side.

That smirk,
that damnable,
smirk, plastered,
forever to your smug mug.

Your ruddy hand
reaches back.
Open palmed
full of scars.
To grasp my mine.
Much smoother skin.

"Come on love,"
you say,
with your voice
full of gravel.

*"Lets get this freak show
on the road."

All this air is getting so thick
With sick, powerful people, taking the open space all away
Concrete on the parks, we use to play
Imprison the mind until those dreams start to fade

We're fighting for oxygen
Suffocating on the stuff they make us breath.
We're fighting for oxygen
Make like the trees but, denied the ability to leave.
We're fighting for oxygen
They sold the air for a lot of corporate greed.

You wouldn't understand all the hands
Shaking ***** plans behind closed doors
You wouldn't understand all the rich
Switching winning sides of a poor man's war.
How can I respect this beautiful land
When it's governed by grease-palmed ******?
How can I respect these political felons
While I'm just fighting for oxygen?

They tell me to take a stand for what's right
In this place I still call free
They tell me to take a stand
"But only if it holds the same view as me"
I'm looking up to stars, light years from this place
Aligned to show a for sale sign on my face
They'd sell the earth I enjoyed living in
And make me fight for this oxygen

In a steady, illiterate static
this room is my study.
And you are my book.

Legs spread 'cross my lap
hands firmly upon my frame.
I lean in to see the words.

Your soft lips graze mine
like branded cattle in a glen.
Wet and cold we sit there.

Then your tongue begins flickering
beguiling like the serpent of Eden.
How could I resist but to bite?

I kiss you sweetly
and you kiss me back.
Minutes pass in the study.

My tongue examines your mouth
like a cartographer mapping a new world.
Each slick and ***** is wholly new to me.

Teeth clink like crystal glasses
during a wedding day toast.
Eyes shut tight make the black of mourning.

The noises dribbling from our mouths sound akin
to a murderer tromping through the forest mud.
Shovel dragging hard. ...Plop...Plop...Plop...

Our hands run over each other's bodies
open-palmed like a child examining the globe.
I want to feel you from pole to pole.

I pull back and run my fingers through your hair.
Your color is rushed with red and you wipe saliva from your lips.
Your smile is without flaws, and you taste like ambrosia.

I love being literate.

With my heart I picture you in polaroids
tinted blue by my eyes, surrounded by crushed leaves.
In the skipping track of my inner eye
your mouth, the way it moves when you focus
the open-palmed reaching of marimba chorale
and softening of your brow from the vines
of midnight-colour hair.
From many perspectives, again and again,
in the skipping track of my inner eye,
photographs shot with love.

short-handed love letters
written in the daydreams of a deliberate narcoleptic.

i send you the paper plane promises of summer
(sealed tightly in sweaty palmed envelopes)

you're not one to read poetry
yet i always manage to find feather light stanzas draped across your shoulders
held down by nothing more
than freckled thumbtacks

years fall away
like too heavy eyelashes onto cheeks

waiting to be brushed away
by the callused fingers of patient lovers

our slow and natural tendencies
our lips mimic the rate of gravity

you use a box cutter to lengthen the creases in my palm

but borrowed time
and fickle fate
will never heal heartbreak

For the girl with the bow in brown hair,

            the heat from the upstairs
restaurant cures the street where we walk,
            the freight’s in on the track,
you can tell by the horns,
            I from the diesel smell below the
afternoon clouds, faint above,
            sometimes when we speak a heart rate
somewhere peaks,
            another graph pinned to an office wall
shows this clear,
            sometimes when we talk tense chests
fear the answer you may say,
            the graph strays past paper and onto
those office walls, in red with a palmed
            smudge where you forgot where
the words ended.

            For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
your eyes are theatre-light reflections in twenty-four hour
window panes sat packed neatly off the corner of West 47th
and 7th, for you’re my central Times Square.

It would behoove my grade school bible teacher to know that I have finally found Jesus.
He sits alone at my neighborhood bar,
and in a fashion that is not unlike the line
at a New York City Jewish deli shop,
he takes questions.
Ticket number 347. “What kind of man will I marry?”
Ticket number 7623. ”When will the end of days come?”
My bible study class, oh,
how they would shake inside their buttoned blouses with envy
that I was the one to find Jesus,
between drinks, between cigarettes,
with beer and peanut excrements on bottoms of his sandals.
Handing out answers like pork cutlets
to mouths that haven’t eaten in years
because they have filled up on the empty appetizer
that is stomach-churning worry:
the gutless and gut-full sin,
of having problems without the hope of solutions
of having questions with silent answers
that it shakes believers so hard in the night they fall off their beds
and they land conveniently on their knees.
They wake up in the morning with bruises and scratches,
external hurts treated with
a mixture of peroxide and stuck-on-you band-aids
that hug tight their stinging cuts until the next day
when the Band-Aid losses its glue and falls off
when they land in meat grinders turning out sausage links
that no one even has an appetite for.

I found Jesus in a bar.

When I see him
I remember Sunday school
and how I stood up on the sweaty palmed stained pulpit and yelled,
“He is not real!”
and now that I am confronted with my falseness
I wonder was I wrong to try to cool the fire of questions unanswered
by answering them myself.

I took a ticket.
I stood in line.
I waited.
The knot my Sunday school teacher tied with my intestines
years ago tightened itself and pulsated
with the influx of another beer
and growing bowel movements that only made me more unsure
of the source of pain in my belly.

I watched
as Jesus nodded politely in between
admissions of sins and proposals of betterment
a gentle, deliberate nod
like his neck was the waist of a Hawaiian girl
on the dashboard of a Colorado trucker,
or maybe like aged fast-food wrappers that tilt forward with the inertia
caused by strategically placed speed bumps.
Each nod, a mini-bow that seemed to contradict
his devotion to his divinity and his authority
over the bleeding-kneed and hungry-stomached servants.

I am the last ticket before the last call and
being this close I can see sweat stains under his arms;
my mother would say they are extra halos.
“And your question, my child?” he says, and
I think I should have been more prepared
or at least not have stuttered like the elementary school student
one stuck playing the under appreciated Pluto in the graduation play.

“Was I wrong that day on the pulpit?”
It was rudely put. I was embarrassed.
He said, “Did it ease the hunger pain of uncertainty?”
He knew it did. So did I.
“Then no, you answered your own question.”
He seemed drunk when he said that,
so I trusted it as a sober man’s thoughts.
Then I walked away full
with knees unscathed.

The gruff factory worker
in the coarse leather boots
and stained zubaz pants,
yelped with displeasure
when the tour guide of
the Pullman company town
revealed himself to be a
PhD candidate in English
during a Q-and-A.

He questioned his credentials,
dismissed him as overeducated,
as soft-palmed, not of his caste,
loudly declared that he was
just another bureaucrat in waiting.

"Institutions just exist to perpetuate
themselves; they don't care about
the people, just about keeping
themselves alive," he theatrically
confided to his friend,
wanting to make sure he heard him,
took note of his flagrant, raging skepticism.

"They got to pay the lawyers."

"All these institutions, they don't care about the workers."

We strode on, amid the shadowed reaches of the empty train car factory the owners long ago abandoned to the rustling prairie,
left to the wind and weeds and elements.

I am twenty-one years old and
I have saved two lives—
a girl whose throat closed despite her
and a boy who thought he had no other choice.
By all accounts, I am
a heroine,
a savior,
some divine-palmed human spread thin
among peers who are the same. The same—
who fear the dark as fully as I
and need the quiet, sometimes,
when the din of all the mouths talking at once
becomes more heavy than loud.
Be gentle, love, approach me slowly—
do not touch my shoulder when
my eyes turn to glass and
know that I hate to be hugged
because your arms will trap my fear somewhere
within me.
I suppose there’s a reason no one writes
what happened to Odysseus
and how the gods felt after their story ended.

Since I have no other way
And am in utmost need,
Painter girl,
I filch one of the eight lambs
You have made plump with
Green jack fruit leaves and
Thin gruel with paddy bran.

I will take it to the goat market
And sell it in a jiffy.

I assure you
I will not sell it
To any butcher-
The lamb you made chubby
With sweet sweet words
And much much petting
And nice lilting croons,
Mixing and mixing
Greens with browns.

Don’t be sad, painter girl.
I hear you come running
Searching for your lamb and
Cry out “O my dearest one
Who went grazing in the green fields,”
As the sun in your canvas
Sets in the sea and
The saffron blends with the dusk.
And, see your tears mingle
With the black that you wanted
To adorn the brow of
The naughtiest of them.

Painter girl,
It’s all because I have no other go
And it’s of utmost need.
I could have broken into the
Two-storeyed house you sketched
And stolen the ornaments in
Secret lockers that even
You are unaware of.

Or, I could have
Palmed the golden girdle
Of the beautiful ***** princess
Whose portrait you made,
The one with a nose stud.
Or, drugged her with my kisses
And plundered the harem.

Or else, I could have
Entered the snake shrine
Guarded by the dark serpents
That you often drew
And fled the country with
The precious jewel.

Or, I could have shot down
The birds that you drew
And sold them grilled.

I could have axed down the
Mahagony trees you nurtured
And sold them as timber.
I could have blinded your Kanhaiah
And made him a beggar
To become rich from the alms he earned.
I could have enslaved his Gopis
And handed them over
To the red light streets.

Painter girl,
It’s not for anything of this sort.
I take just one of your eight lambs.
Sell it for a good price
And fulfil my need.

Now, perchance,
If a new tenant comes to rent
My brain where nothing resides
And if they pay me a fat advance,
Painter girl,
Surely will I buy back your lamb.
And tether it in your painting.
Don’t you dare say then
Don’t you say then
That you have forgotten it.
Don’t you say then
You have exhausted your stock of
Green jack fruit leaves.

He kicks the cobblestones
Cold air embraced his stature
A cigarette palmed he walks
Down the cherry blossom avenue
The subtle petals fell with each step
Stony path kissed his feet repeatedly
Lalic light burst through flowers
Lightly touched his burning skin
Night worshiped his casted shadow
Breezes breathed in his fragrance

This world's a story
filled with stones: those five
smooth ones; some temple
tumbling to; a mountain's
stubborn bones. Take this one,

pocked, rounded, smoothed,
rocked by currents sure
they'd find the way. Blue
(or vaguely gray), flecked gold
no miners mine, or can,

diminished thing from David's
bolder day, it chooses you.
Palmed in your closing hand,
it's good, the heft of it, live weight
to tell a tale that's true.

Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.

In this chapter of life,
I decipher decisions with my knife,
resting under a tree,
staying out of the light,
i know i must stay alive,
resting my hand on the hilt of my sword,
standing for battle once more,
I lower my mask,
to show my evil core,
a wondering ronin bent on settling a score,

I fight for family,
and poverish,
and anyones who's suffered,
my katana will strike for you,
pride of the samurai,
fire falls from the sky,
let the gods cry tonight,
tonight, tonight,

Using my thumb,
I release my zanpakuto from its sheath,
I'm ready to strike at any time,
but first i think of the ones i love,
for if it wasn't for them,
I wouldn't be standing today,
glancing down to see the three skulls hanging from my waist, residing next to my knife,
the man whom taught me to fight,
the day he died,
he lied in my arms,
i love.....
never getting to say who,
might have been the first time my father cried,
the same king hath slain dad in my eye,
was the same man,
to burn my son alive,
only proceeding to **** and **** my wife,
she ceased to cry,
I never shed a tear,
just held their screaming heads for all to hear,
i started to walk,

I fight for family,
and poverish,
and anyones whos suffered,
my katana will strike for you,
pride of the samurai,
fire falls from the sky,
let the gods cry tonight,
tonight, tonight,

With every clinching strike,
I **** the demons underlings,
slicing and hacking,
I remember each and every soul,
I'll pray for them,
not to be ***** in hell,
standing before the demon king,
grabbing my sword I don't even need,
I could **** this man with one bare hand,
he'll cower in fear as my kin never did,
I cut him once across his chest,
splitting his cage of once were ribs,
his organs spill to the ground,
finger through the blood,
lower down to grab his heart,
palmed his head in my bare fist,
raising my sword to his neck,
you think this is pain?
try hell,
with that said,
I split his head from his neck,
tying his hair to my belt,
a fourth skull i must hold.

Mei Mei wears the same,
“Signature,” every week,
Silk atop a smell soiled – Mao,
Burnt wood boiling frogs,
And a mother crying alongside
Ditch;
Ancient and ever’ed, leather
Peddling vegetables,
Not so many sold,
And atop something slight,
Thinner than rice whittled wrists,
Her red-printed tender
Intended daughter, “away,”
Under pink bow tie
And dreams wrought a village’s
Wheat and desires ancient –
All they’d offer progeny.

Mei Mei’d been born
And Mei Mei’d be gone;
All a grin, all a stage,
Come left, those who’d know last,
Stone tiers tethered past,
And right,
Others that’d someday follow;
She’d only be the first to leave.
And sure, she’d been frightened,
And sure, she’d been homesick,
With phone, “home,” ‘ever palmed,
And dreams ‘ever determined.
She’d shiver leg, wax poetry
Big cities, and boys so that
Dreamt be dealt,
Demise, be ******, and
“Mei Mei’d,” take on the world!

*Note - Inspired by a wonderful student of mine who graduated but days ago; grab the world by the horns, girl! You've inspired me, that's for sure!

The bonsai grew all wrong
Its branches outweigh the base
And the wood is whispy and pale
Without the spring a sapling entails
It's big, much too big, too long
A band stretched past its place
Becomes a twig in impatient hands
Pressured, and snapped, and palmed
Bonsai's mature slowly
With snow and vibrant leaves
To rush things is more than lowly
You've sold their soul you thieves

fireworks sparkle
the darkened sky of my memory,
sparkling through my soul in a pleasant wave,
uncovering a walk in the jungle of my heartland

and a guava tree.

I’m in my kitchen, filling my nose
with the delicate scent of ripening guavas from Mexico,
palmed in the chalice of my hands,
feeling my way to that jungle walk with my family when I was three
or maybe two, in Hawai’i

and the guava tree.

as I bite through the fragile skin of the yellow globe,
the seeds, like BBs, take me further into my remembrance,
my family around me sharing
the excitement and joy I felt when I saw and climbed

the guava tree.

after we moved back to the Mainland
to a desert paradise I also loved,
each Spring I came down with what I called my Island Virus:
a deep yearning and homesickness
for my heartland

and the guava tree.


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

Collapsing emotions
            corrode on my
          ****** perfection.

What was diminishing,
   now collecting in a cup
            of palmed hands collected.


I wanted to no that of your
               miracles,
                            that even
though tears fell,
you never turned

            those now memory to a wine
                         of hope...

Auschwitz was a million
                  tears choked,
but you never turned
a single tear
               to a vintage of peace.


We just choked on the tears,
     and we were a vineyard
                         of silence.


Each a grape that never reached
               maturity.

Instead we fell before we could become
              more that we were.
These tears are sour,
and the taste
                erodes every fallen tears morality.

When we were kids we had ideas and dreams,
Of what we wanted to be.
It boiled down to one thing,
We wanted to be a somebody.
We could go as far as our imagination would let us.
And the stars were just figures in the sky,
That one day we could reach out and touch.
Maybe we just wanted to leave this world a better place,
Than when we met it
Maybe we just wanted to be remembered for something great.
But we grew up.
Dreams faded into the ether of the past.
And we became what we become.

Waitress' and waiters.
Callous palmed factory workers.
Ticket booth operators.
Cleaners, tradesmen and
Bus drivers.
Barmen, bank clerks and
Insurance salemen
People that make the world tick.

When you walk down the street,
You can hear a chorus of unsung hymns.
The girl who just wanted to sing.
But was too afraid to take to the stage.
So her songs remain hers.
The unseen kid.
Who's got a notebook of broken dreams.
But remains alive.
Because it's through the ink that his heart beats.
Through his words that his thoughts breathe.
Or the man who works a job he hates.
Just to hold up his family.
These people are just living their lives.
But these people are somebody to someone

Don't let this be just another poem.
Don't let these words mean nothing.
Their is more in life than being great.
Is it not enough to make one person happy.
Is it not enough to make yourself happy.
Nobody can define you.
The walls might not fall but
You got to try and make them
You can be anything you want to be.
Sing like no one's listening.
Dance like no one's watching.
Shine as bright as you can.

You are a somebody.
You always have been.
And you still have time to be.

I think about you better with my eyes closed,
My love where do I begin.
The beginning is as close as the end,
Although there is a lot of time spent in between.
I can't seem to get enough of you,
Something is missing, especially without you.

Your energy lingers on me long after you are gone,
Like the scent of the beloved that sticks.
Sweet palmed baby,
Soft eyed angel.
A gentle voice escapes your delicate lips,
Floaty words wander out and right into me.

Nothing compares to one short evening,
Me in a room with you.
With some strawberries and wine,
We are touching and talking.
A brief warm light bursting through,
Yet too weak to reflect on anything.

The only nights I do not dream about you,
Are ones that I'm asleep next to you.
The nights you have your plush rosy lips on me before,
I drift into a sort of peacefulness only found within you.
A crisp soft blow building up on me,
Until we collide, meet at some spot of sweet release.

I no longer recognise the hours night turns into day,
Or the noises that surround us, like chirping birds.
Two worlds subconsciously complimenting eachother,
The taste of your candied skin remains on my tongue.
Tracing my tongue and all down my throat,
It lingers longer, beyond us parting.

I look at my dad laying on his side:
a shoulder pinned to neck.
Opposite arm relaxed, open-palmed.

His heavy body leaned on a crusty elbow
and you’d think his eyes swelled in utero
because he’d just fetalconjured the invention
of the television and its screen.

My brain swims in a bone basin
and I’m human because I can’t stop moving.
As narration and pixels flash in the bedroom,
(this room could be a womblike calm),
my dad is beached, rejected by the waters he denies.

In and out of sleep, he snores awake.
Other times my mom wakes him and says
she hasn’t stopped all day.
Sometimes families do not know to build safe spaces.
My brain shudders when I’m ****** and
when I have to weigh my cargo.

I didn't realize that I had missed the rabbits so
til I nearly stumbled over one in the dark and dew

impossibly still and also bounding with movement, vibrating
a tenacious anxiety reflected back to me in more than one
lost, drunken, exasperated moment
memories inevitably left in backseats and waterlogged journals
the thorny irony of holding fervently what this life means to me
and for me
knowing I've forgotten nearly most of it
to trauma
and to time

why would I tuck away the times I've made myself the image of my parents?
why cherish and return to the slur of dysfunction and imbalance
why build myself on the moments I broke upon

each falter is palmed inside me
slick and pressed with dust
the life of every love and bond
I can't release
for fear that I will sink into the sky
for fear that I've only ever been a reflection
is it empathy? maybe it's a pervasive fear of abandonment
as you cannot leave me if you need me
as you cannot fear me if you trust me
as you cannot without me
and I, you

I am delirious, lingering from days
frayed at both ends, especially the head
and knotted in the middle, a rope tightened
round the heart, squeezing beats out
in stops and starts, oh but this is how
we play the game, it's sweaty palmed,
brow furrowed fun, with far too many clocks
cold halls to walk, amongst holy ghosts
tearing through white sheeted rooms, they haunt
or sometimes they bring invisible healing
placing flowers in colorful rings
and garlands circling round the bed
and in the night, only blue white light
to fill a room, basked in love
a tattered heart to mend

Drink from it, that pearly blackness,
Instructed the trees; towering
Dark spires bleeding upward.
Not ominous, but cynical, like
They’ve seen this all before.

Take it as it is, they insisted.
No, don’t think of her, not now,
nor him, nor him, nor her.
Stop passing the buck
From your field; let it graze.

Don’t be embarrassed to be
That wounded deer. They
Offered some gesturing limbs
Towards your lunar embankment,
But refused further comment.

I sat there awhile, the low shrubs
Rubbing shoulders, greasy-palmed
Handshaking as if placing bets on
How long I’d last, How long it’d be
Before I drank from that pearly blackness.

the fall
was slow, rough
bitter, red palmed.

And ashes.

glassy eyed, a slough, sweat
wet and washed, the gloom
of gold.

And saliva.

Apollo descended, Godiva
roamed, Eros marched, God grinned
yellow teeth

For all.

These, I heard,
were gifts of the grieving,
forged by the martyrs, stolen
for the saints

And time
has resurrected fools
for halos-- wings too frail
to carry the masses; to settle
for stigmata,

And golden rings
to bind the mind, as if we
had never carried the cross

Of being alive.

i want to be touched by somebody
with burgundy blood on his hands;
red handed
raw palmed
legs strangled in maroon bedsheets.

a murderers kiss must be a rush,
blood exploding from every pore in my
bled out skin,
wounds opening willingly for his searching
hands to make
a sort of house out of my bones.
creating a home for something
wild
who has only ever met closed doors
and distant, fearful faces.
i'd prove i wasn't scared of
the dark eyes,
and hungry lips,

knowing at any moment he could push the
cool lips of a golden .45 caliber revolver
and splatter my ****** through the
wooden bedpost and the
flaking, collapsing drywall.

i've followed thrills ever since i was
in third grade,
convincing a boy to take off his clothes
and show me what "men" are made of
and sneaking behind my mothers
injured back
stealing things i wasn't supposed to know about.
i liked putting myself through the danger,
unknown
it rushed up my legs and
rendered me breathless and craving more.  

i've always wanted to hold
something shaking
and cold
and let them tell me stories
out of their biting teeth
of when when it all started:
they were small and rode their bicycle
so fast they fell and skinned their
soft pink cheeks on the black cement
and went crying to their mother with blood dripping
down
a mixture of tar and red.

i'll tell them there's some place in hell
in the beating, drumming heart of the earth
warm darkness compacted,
where you can buy cigarettes for
50 cents a pack,
and whiskeys in water bottles and skin is naked
guns are loaded to shoot down the moon
and eat it with crunching, crumbly golden crackers.
where there is no sleep
only midnight writing furiously on the stark pages
of a shredded journal
dawn walks down the lively sidewalks where
other sleepless figures of orange peel flavored darkness
and coffee bean stained teeth dance and laugh and touch
in the darkest parts of the invisible morning
sweat intermixed unrecognizably with tears
and people hold their belongings in
the drooping bags under their bright eyes,
where screams of pleasure echo in every
cavern and creaking limb you touch
to the atmosphere
and people make love easier
than they
destroy necks.

i'll whisper
"when you're rotting underground
with your teeth in a
waxen, strained smile with lovers flesh embedded
in your own homely skull,
and your fingers are feasts for writhing worms,

and i'm dancing chaotically as ever in the raging wind,
a desert flower reduced to
bright-eyed dust
thrown lightly into the sinking seeds of a garden
with flowers growing out of my decomposing
echo of a body
like an
articulate oil painting decorating the earth to remind them
of my eternity,
i'll sink all the way through the soil
and follow the heartbeats

i'll meet you there."