A once dear friend
And I met up;
Twenty years since we spoke,
And neither one could talk.
We left each other's company
On terms of disagreement.

The ice was thick;
The air was clouded;
We stood beneath the shade.

The mountain didn't fall;
The earth didn't swallow;
The roof stayed on.
Nothing cracked our uncertainty.

Then we misquoted some old
Misunderstood memories
Of why we went our ways.
And felt the same.

if i were to bread my tongue
with rocoto and cornmeal
and twist to reach the andean soil
my tastebuds long for so many nights
out of the year
olfaction and your left-sinus blockage
would stay cradled
in broken-baguette bread-crust baskets,
a trebuchet's missile,
naïve to the horn of the world,
and brittled to a carcinogenic crisp
caped in my earthenblood geysers
en el humo, en la tierra del fuego
in(fierno)

i recount by the tally marks of black felt
resorted to in the puddling of spilt tea,
(like broken china, you never missed
a beat to correct potential error

and my memory),
i count them to remember
the epiphanies standing over a red faucet
a gallon water jug, whistling snail-trickle,
wishing away the cracks in the grout
or the grout itself,
wishing away the cracks in the pottery
or porcelain facade of which
you're so fond and grace with singing cuticles

the fingers of a pianist
lacking the wherewithal
and solid brick gall
to answer the ivory's summons

i am not a piece of clay,
i respond poorly to your sculpture of my surface,
covered in oxides and baked in
hell's oven, your mountain fire
scathes me as it does cedar resin
and i am similarly embittered,
pooling sap & draining smoke
in the embers and dead charcoal
of your embrace

avant le corps, sans l'âme
sans le corps, avant l'âme

Funny how easy
Loves appears to be, until
It laughs with the other easily
Reconcilable "maybes"
That devalue your first "hello".

First, it began as "hello".
Little did you know how
Interested he would be in you, but
Reflecting on it now, you see how those
Tender tendencies weren't exclusive.

Finally, all you have left is "hello",
Like every other girl he knows.
Inevitably, you're one of many
Recycled pretties that thought
They were more than another "maybe".

I want to fall into you,
but you'd rather ****** into me.
And that may be reconcilable for a second
or two
or three.
You turn late nights into later mornings--somewhere exploring skin as if there's no one else,
daring me to bring earthquakes to our footing on common ground that makes me
want to crash into you.
Yet you only plunge into me for an hour
or two
or three.
And I still push closed doors open in my hopeful head
while you can't conceive the thought of us-- or even me--
without the sheets from my bed

I've got a crayon in my hand,
a color for every lost syllable
There's a brightly scribbled drawing
to make my mouth and head reconcilable