It’s Valentine’s Day.
Daddy makes coffee in two cups heart-shaped cups.
Mommy is in bed, sleeping in.
Daddy waits for Mom to wake up- she doesn’t
but she’s still breathing.
Daddy sighs and goes to work.
Mommy shakes my sister and me awake
and pulls us into boots and coats and gloves.
We tiptoe over shards of glass on the way out.

Mommy drives too fast.
She makes me watch when the light is green for go
at long intersections because she keeps getting something in her eye.
We get to the airport.
Mommy dashes inside like a guilty person in a movie
but I know she’s innocent because she’s my mom.
I sit and watch planes disappear into bundles of clouds that look like white cotton-candy
and planes land pulling their wheels into their chest with a fast whoosh.

Mommy comes back empty-handed.
One long sigh passes her lips
before she starts the car.
My sister asks where are we going.
Mommy only gets a short sound out but I know she means home.
“Good,” my sister says. “I’m tired.”
“Me too,” Mommy replies.

"You're tired, aren't you?"*

Not in the way that you think.

What good is a poem?
It will not bring back the dead.
It will not feed the hungry
Or shape the steel.
It cannot heal the scarred
Or cradle the heart broken.
In fact I cannot say, at this moment
If a poem can do any good.

What good is a poem?
It can heal the heart filled with despair.
It can inspire higher ideals.
It can rouse laughter from a weary soul.
It can inform.

What good is a poem to you?

hope is a hoax
a sick joke that always ends
like a punch in the throat
cage up my guts and
crush the butterflies
departing my vacant stomach

i've grown sick of all the lust
that always crawls over us
invisible cockroaches scurrying
across emaciated flesh
give me the needle the drug
part my skin succumb to sin
addicts trying to kick our habit
desperate for the next fix

whispers and insinuations
an endless simulacrum
an earnest emulation built
on selfish impulses that
never fail to corrode and
corrupt until there's nothing left
of us but shattered shells in
self-made hells begging
for another bump

and while no god presides over
this unending infatuation
i've asked the skies to answer why
i am always second rate
gathering dust while
you **** a hollow husk
of a human being

am i the crux
of true love or
am i just a crutch