On Monday, my husband waits until I get home to say the words.
I go to unload the car and carry back tears.
Sitting, stirring, I begin to take out stitches on
a strayed shawl for the third time.

An artist and an adventurer, she sipped Dickle and ate meat
and raised chickens. She slept in a small house to live spaciously.
Erin was tall and never knowing of how she showed me to
express, explore, expand, to exist.

On a long ago Friday, with frayed Carhartt pants, we were
chatting about women, and their depictions in magazines,
Erin says,“Well, they’re not shaped like a real woman.”
For a lasting moment, I see from her wise and lovely eyes.

Erin is a stitch unlooped from our tight knit.
A drafty gratitude, a sudden shiver. She was here, with us, with the world.  
And now we are looping onto each other, tenaciously.
Even so, what are we to do with slipped stitches and this hole?

May we purl pain into artistry. All we have to do is add the t.  
So we will paint. And we will climb mountains.
We will tear and we will cry and live and bleed and die.
Until then, we have no other task than to knit ourselves together.

embarking upon a further
journey down the same path

almost four years,
but now: newer, exciting routes
new junctions to
cross the t’s, dot the i’s

but the letters remain
unfinished, unlooped—though
the knots are still tangled

why’d the past have to catch up
with someone else’s love?

spare the reminder
of a lovesick fool,
not quite so much lovesick
as desperate to prove.

tomorrow never comes;
the future is today
and it’s here and now and
yes, yes, things are gonna

change for the better
the best endeavour of life so far
begins without her in it

isn’t that proof enough?

we made it.

✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪
My terrifyingly-terrifical reality warps under therapies psychiatrical
& psychedelical like no Atlantic tuna fisherman's scale pentatonical
upon oceanically-flat, perpendicularly-level sea planes capitalistical
while birds fly lower in an arid-zoned Arizona that's deterministical
& esoterical as men push thumbs up girly ***** for hikes strategical
after circle jerking to shows that're less proctological than athletical
but rarely & lamely ever, hungrily-raunchily-anorexically bulimical
I fork pitches into threshed alfalfa hay bales like I am pyromaniacal
and susceptibly prone to no ills local nor core diseases xenotropical
Hey largish woman, let us fish for warm regards at Cold *** Harbor
before our freshest blue turds are totally stolen by a bold **** robber
whose pushers are burned crack hoes with clap & an old **** jobber
fishing for the corpses of Frisco floaters with a *****-slotted bobber
off the Golden Gate where gag-happy girls have sold spit as slobber
while each ***** pukes peat & tosses penicillin as a mold-pit lobber
on leave from a Georgia chain-gang as a queer, unshod clod hopper
twice demoted from flat-ball spotter to broken Hoboken hobnobber
who, like Hillary, survives on gray, vomited Hoboken squat cobbler
in gay museums & ***** ***** houses as a snot-clobbered shopper
resigned to tease, displease & nonviolently seize Herr Alvin Toffler
Pay more at Mary Tyler Moore's fish store on the floor of the shore,
with Al Gore on his "global"-warmin' tour to make wealthy men poor
I don't puke anymore like I used to once in awhile never always did
'cause I gave up stinking diarrhea-sponsored rotten octopus & squid
that I inhaled like ******* on reduced food stamps when I was a kid
thrilling to vicious Johnny Rotten caterwauling over the bass of Sid
long before biddin' on the corpse of Jimmy Carter with a sealed bid
that I put under my fat folds where the fatty **** was that I often hid
so cops couldn't cop 4 fingers of ganjah rope that made for 1 *** lid
before I ride a homosexy unicorn that ain't by no *** queen been rid
Never have I wanted to scoop up the reekin' **** of an ill, zoo rhino
while I'm happy I wasn't born an easily-sun-burnt, pink-eyed albino
or a back-alley ***** in love with a stinking, Hillary-screwin' wino
whose drunken state makes him reply to cake, "Yes" & to pie, "No"
whilst he pees on California droughted pines from pine A to pine O
Look at me, I'm half stupid from being unlooped so long from here,
like someone unable to revive dead Sonny or disengage harlot Cher
from her lezzy-*** intrigues that Salvatore & Gregory couldn't bear
at the grimy Pittsburgh ****** for which sickly Cher did not prepare
for oozin' vaginal rifts that her gynecologist had to surgically repair