This morning before
I ever lifted my head,
I turned to see
Your half of the bed.
And what a harsh reminder
Of how I'm growing old
With your side of the bed
Still unbearably cold.
Your sheets are not tossed,
Your pillow unpressed--
All lovely reminders
Of my current distress.
Was it not merely a month ago
That I was curled against your skin?
We were perfect puzzle pieces,
Your shoulder to my chin.
All day long
We would curl up and sleep
With nothing like time
And business to keep.
But what a terrible disease
Lurked inside my mind.
I never thought I could be
So selfish and unkind.
If only I had known
I was capable of such sin
I never would have let
Our cursed romance begin.
I could promise to never
Let it happen again.
I could take my pills
Like I refused to then.
I could be so much better,
My darling, please see.
If only, if only
You'd come back to me.

Oh fairest of the rural maids!
Thy birth was in the forest shades;
Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky,
Were all that met thy infant eye.

Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child,
Were ever in the sylvan wild;
And all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.

The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks;
Thy step is as the wind, that weaves
Its playful way among the leaves.

Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene
And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.

The forest depths, by foot unpressed,
Are not more sinless than thy breast;
The holy peace, that fills the air
Of those calm solitudes, is there.

Sometimes, I'd think that I missed it.
All the late-night conversations,
good morning "I love you"s,
glances exchanged in the halls,
awkward smiles,
adorable nicknames,
that bracelet.

But I don't wear that bracelet anymore,
not since you starting doubting all we had.

When the good morning texts were just typed,
sitting there with the send button unpressed.
When we started avoiding each other in the halls
because we couldn't bear to see the other's face.
When those awkward smiles we'd exchange
turned into just plain awkward.
When the adorable nicknames went away.
When that bracelet just sat there,
on my dresser instead of my wrist.

Sometimes, I thought I missed the way we were.
But now I know, we're better off the way we are.

I thirst.

 

You rip through here

a hurricane

biting through civilians and officials alike

until their bloodshed stains the streets

and the streams tick off the tally of your victims

your only aim to crush and maim

regardless of the death toll

or the reason

or the phasing of the moon

And then come crashing down again

 

while we are left, shaking our heads,

to sweep your secrets

into crematoria and coffins

Then dust off our hands

to wipe away your tears

 

and scrub away the fever

That leaves a ring of soapy sickness

in your bathwater

And then hold you,

bitter infant,

until the tide falls away

 

The constants, the healers,

What some call the mothers

though you are not our blood children

 

We are the ones that soothe your cuts and burns

Listen to your side of the story

And settle the fights of dollar bills

and ancestors

that you scorn without abandon

Hear you simper for a lullaby

As we rock you back to sleep

 

But the sighs don’t escape

until after we’ve checked under the bed for monsters

for the hundredth

or the thousandth

or the millionth time this week;

we can’t let you catch on

that the only real beasts lie within ourselves.

 

We would give you the moon

Had you not tamed it

And the deserts for your sandbox

But no matter what we give

You want it all you want it all

And we want nothing

NOTHING

in return

Just a single peaceful night,

vengeful child,

tea stirred with vanilla and sleep

but your screamings pierce our dreams

and nightmares

 

We are the worrywarts

The unsure

The cautious and the skeptics

Who don’t believe in jumping on the bed

Or in other such adventures

 

We are wrinkled brows and unpressed collars

The “it’s for your own good”s and the seamstresses

That stitch your heart back together

Before it’s broken one time too many

 

And you end up like us.

 

We are the aftermath, the backstory,

the prayers and dictionaries

that make it out of life alive

The Barmecidal harmony, the snatches of hymns

 

We are the scraps of coffee-tainted paper

that you slap against the telephone poles

As if the taste of scathing news-ink

is a bandage for the hurting

And we fold debris into our kerchiefs

saving them as souvenirs

 

And you call us close-minded

You call us cowards

As you snap your jaws and roar

down a vast and lonesome prairie

like the wind

 

Fast to laugh

and quick to run away

 

As we wander the streets lonely,

the gaslamps shattered on the cobblestones,

and stoop to collect the pieces

of the life you left behind.

 

Forgive them, Father,

for they know not what they do.

tap me right and i am a tuning fork
my bones hum a desire to shirk, to move,
to shake the dust for vistas unseen

my feet are hungry
my skin has to taste every flavor of dirt
it gets bored with the daily repetition of texture and shade

what of all the palms unpressed and eyes ungazed?

i am a drunk and i'm late and i can't find my keys but i know they're in my bedroom somewhere
so i search unevenly, moving from corner to corner, stumbling, overturning pillows and ***** t-shirts, knocking down lamps, cursing and muttering, squinting and sweating ugly

this is my each day. my skin feels too tight. i want to crack it open at my elbows and the edges of my scalp and crawl out of myself,
swollen so large no city can contain me.
let me boil until i am atmosphere,
citizen of every nation,
kisser of every lip and eyelid,
dervish of every flame or patch of dry earth.

Sometimes I can hear it,
the voice of a fallen leaf
lost to the wind.
Its gallant effort to become apparent
as if it was more then just one of the rest.
It says, "Let your footsteps be kind
and not trample my body,"
This earth is too fleeting.
I'm sure it would think.
To be whole and unpressed,
Not without burden
A small voice that descends
*soft like the drop of a pin.
"I can hear you," I whisper
among all these branches
They don't speak like they used too.
I'm sure the fallen would think.

The washing machine
Rattles
And I think of high school *******

Ashamed
Of temptation I envision
A golden field
Burning in a grey Winter Sky

Hanging by the tip of my tongue
Love flees from my fingertips
Another notch on the belt like
The days, the months, the years

Numbers piling up

When did age become so important?
Wrinkles being the only way to tell time
Pain the only way to know one is truly living
Dreams ephemeral as the song of the angels
A lasting tradition never to be found out

Deep within these woods madness lurks
Underneath the tanned' bark of certain trees
A murderer picks his teeth with a rusty nail
The running waterfalls cease to crash
Midnight leaks onto the kitchen floor like spilt milk
And the wind - exhausted - stops to take a breath

Boredom thick as the pine and the bush
Rushing like the crystal river at foot
Unpressed by family in their telephone chatter
The dog waits at the edge of the door
In his eyes curiosity, demand, and vigor

There was something else I meant to do
A sign missed or misread
Maybe I missed a message in the mail?
A call that didn't come through

Seeing the glass murky in the mid summer sun
A nod, a smirk, a smile, a frown - blank
Beds made with the pillows fluffed dreams spent for bus fare
A knock at the door that is not mother

We try
Again and again for success

Not even knowing
If the wish will bring

Happiness or more

Further nightmares

I saw it today. Stark aberration in my periphery. Flaccid and pale it was, like wan chicken fat under plucked skin. It blotted everything in the rear view mirror, jolting my reverie of quiet snow dancing across the road, resting on quilted cover lawns and frosting happy trees with dollops of white on spruce. So many distractions in the metal box, the meandered chatter punctuated with hiccup sighs and upended sentences. Now this…my neck in all its grisly middle aged wattling display. Like roadkill on a scenic Sunday drive. I’m mortified.
Wrenched from my tenure of “office know it all” or at least “figure it on the fly” chick in the high desert to this lakeside time warp, this place of gravy and pitched roofs, I’m totally off my jalapeno. Gone are the adobes and red or green breakfast plates to be replaced by the Sunday tradition of one hour with the silvers and breakfast with Bob " Bob Evans that is. Amazing how rote runs a brain. An epistle, the gospel, a homily and polite pew sharing with communion wrap up " it took a full minute for anyone to register  that one of our seasoned pieces of lumber was not slumbering but without breath altogether… and still so many went forward for the cup and the wafer in routine obedience.
Margaret asked me later “is he still gurglin’?” as though slumped over parishoners in a diabetic episode are commonplace, and sometimes a body leaves with an EMT escort. (He’s ok. At least that’s what we were told)
I keep looking out the bedroom window, the cascading sugary stuff glazing the scene framed by mauve curtains and punctuated by the few stoic sparrows too resolute or stupid to fly south to green paradise. I’m grooveless unpressed vinyl still waiting for the imprint of music. A rhythm above the chatter both inside my head and outside.
I’m a quiet creature - at least I crave the solitude and peace and I am diametrically opposed therefore to the queen of this house who savors light and movement and the noise of constant conversation. She’s been more than kind to open her home to us and I’m sure it’s difficult to have scuttling creatures in your home who prefer the sunless corners, the basement, the predawn holy places where nothing moves except the snow before the plow to the endless drone of voices. She’s flown solo in this house for nine years. Now it’s full of people who make no noise, no decibel print and it must be irksome to her.
I try to compromise, to curb my urge to run from the meal table and **** the myriad things that wait in my personal life. The bills, the bank issues " who knew our financial institution was unrepresented in this chile-less place? Who knew everything cost twice as much as it does way out west? Who knew unemployment insurance does not ensure a survivable wage?  All the tiny things I hold at bay until I can sit no longer. Patience. I lack it. I can learn to compromise, but I cannot quell completely who I am. It has been that attempt over the last decade to stifle what is inside that has made me itchy and twitchy and ****** now. That and that damnable wattling neck.  Yes, I’m stripped of all I was when I was what I was in the middle of the high desert and now the only thing left is the stuff simmering in my head…
Peace.

My sweet little mollusk,
You polish the sea-tangy sand dollars smooth with the soles of your feet
You fill up your sweet siren lungs with a sun-sated breeze and submerge your bare fingers
Until they can sweep the slippery silt of the seabed abyss. I can’t sleep.
Your anemone fingers trace watery ripples through the ebbs of my dreams, trailing streams
Of fluorescent-blue algae sunk deep.  Your barnacle tongue shatters ships
Into ruinous splinters of treasure. I kiss
The cerulean ocean that hides in your lips.

My sweet little scallop,
The galloping waves break the curves of your shallows.
There are flecks of unpressed sea salt brine in your irises, tireless riptides of foaming-bright promises.
Your skin has the silvery sparkle of scales that effervesce endlessly, bending beneath the fierce tides of your palmprints.
I’m dropping. The current caresses your cheeks’ fishbone hollows, rethreading the necklaces strung out of seashells.
You bury your face in the swells of the tempest. I envy
Your azure, I worship your lapis.

My sweet little mussel,
Your tussled cyan-coral hair is unbleached, unleeched and resplendent
I am rendered transcendent by the green iridescence of your silk seaweed whispers. I have drowned in your splendid.
I can still hear your aquamarine through the white roaring waves cracking onto the shore.
I want more. Your crustaceous sand whirlpool has nestled below the soft curl of your chest. You press the world’s oceans in the dip of your palms
And drink deep from the waves swirling under.
I’ve drowned in the water-spilled seas that are cupped in your hands,
I have drowned in the pearls of your wonder.

Scab-badge people with baggage eat cabbage in the clap-&-crab age
only to worship a charismatically-self-anointed by Christ, drab sage
My flaxen-tressed princess, let us meet where we won't be trampled
by Jo's pig herds, in South Africa where ******* make more *******
with the ½-best-ever versions of hemi-bald-leg-length quick ******
I studied all Saturday night, and I got no sleep and I got no rest, just
to pass a freaking 1 dollar ***** analysis Dollar Tree pregnancy test
'cause my virginity's doubted by bums who've ****** me undressed
because my virginity is proven by Yankee sailors who **** me best
because my purity's unknown to sailors who'd ****** me unpressed
as my purity's prized by truckers who have reamed me unimpressed

Impossible: But it's separated along the corners. Yes, I know. If I fold it to the left I'll scrape either ******. That's why you should ease the padding over. Oh.

Scab-badge people with baggage eat cabbage in the clap-&-crab age
only to worship a charismatically-self-anointed by Christ, drab sage
My flaxen-tressed princess, let us meet where we won't be trampled
by Jo's pig herds, in South Africa where ******* make more *******
with the ½-best-ever versions of hemi-bald-leg-length quick ******
I studied all Saturday night, and I got no sleep and I got no rest, just
to pass a freaking 1 dollar ***** analysis Dollar Tree pregnancy test
'cause my virginity's doubted by bums who've ****** me undressed
because my virginity is proven by Yankee sailors who **** me best
because my purity's unknown to sailors who'd ****** me unpressed
as my purity's prized by truckers who have reamed me unimpressed