you had a lump in your throat every time you spoke,
it should’ve disappeared but your voice became a croak

you cleared your throat a lot,
for every word that got caught

you stopped talking about your passions;
i think your heart had run out of its rations

you helped others out many times before,
but suddenly your reassurance was no more

your silences grew longer;
i should’ve known you were a goner

you left all these warnings,
yet here i was, in mourning.

he took the blade on my skin and turned it into the pen on my paper

Her days are gray watercolor, pale on thin paper.
It has soaked through into soft, lumpy creases
like the lines on her forehead or cream left in sun.

She is a toy train left running on its endless metal loop,
hollow breaths without inhale, moving without movement.
Fuel and track are here, but the conductor has fallen asleep.

Her thoughts blend like nectar on honey-comb walls,
the impatient drip still not enough to push her from the hive.
In this golden opposition, she watches earth dance without her.

What could pull her out like the pit out of a plum
was not hoping, nor was it medicine or error.
She was lost in an open sea, red bricks tied to her ankles.

But chains may loosen in the bright white of baby, challenged
by new life in peril. It is her time to fail wholly, to surrender,
forever choosing absence over presence, shallow over deep.

Or it is her time to look at what she has lost;
husband, independence, her life. Ten years of stale air
has finally split her open, fully agape at the seams.

In a burst of concentrated ignorance and esteem
she has acted, she has won. As if guided by Divine hands,
gray has peeled away. Dress her in pinks, yellows, greens.

you write poems
about lost love,
broken hearts,
and failed redemption.

you write tragedies
about lonely nights,
crying minds,
and bleeding gashes of regret.

you write monologues
about voiceless mouths,
venomous words,
and inevitable decay.

you write autobiographies
about faded dreams,
unheard whispers,
and vanishing memories.

you write
about what once was.

and i do, too.

though i doubt your poems are about me
like mine are about you.

(a.m.)