Look on me dearly:
your stolen sullied sullen

daughter. I could dig you up
to hold your bones but

want only to wash myself
away, like white foam

from the seashore.
If I burn what is buried,

is it cremation
or disintegration? You would fly

ashes in the wind, like a wish
given

lift, like an altar of lit
incense.

Think of learning of your blood:
yellow skin and rice paddies

and great-great-great-great-granddaddy
grey for the Confederacy.

Do two halves not one whole
soul make? I take

a breath
and leave it

free.

wants me to tear
my heart out ******
for her to hold,
still-beating, sticky
fingers tasting rich
like butterfly feet;
but see
the scar-marked bark
has closed it in
pulse-roots solid strung to lungs
corded grip of kin
sordid so
she asks me smiling again
and hands me the silver platter
and her
shining dinner
knife.

Alone on the pedestrian bypass bridge,
breathing summer sunset,
I swirl the stubby balsa spoon on my tongue
as the evening commute buzzes beneath my feet,

and wonder: how did I miss this all before?
how
wind washes bare arms,
world still
soft round
the sharp edges;
how ivy lush covers thickly the brick walls over,
and brazen broad-leafed bushes
crowd onto cobblestone street corners, and
wistful weeds cushion cement sidewalk cracks;

how when the sun’s rays are blades from the horizon,
our city lights twinkle tight but
tap dance so light on the retina
in the vignetted  
sky of creamsicles and cotton candy;
and how
the frozen chocolate chips
break brittle between my teeth
and the cookie-dough bite’s so smooth
and still so tooth-melting sweet

poetry is wings
fluttering against cupped palms
to keep & set free

“You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” –Rumi

I am endless infinite possibility,
a Boltzmann brain fluctuated from the
furious buzzing entropy thrilling the
scattered melted formless universe,
collapsed into the thin singularity string of
an impossible human being.
The world is testament to my stunning genius
a grand hallucination of my own creation
and I am my own invention.

elusive
a school of silver fish in the net
all slick small enough to slip
drip through the cracks
gaps plink wriggle back
into the sea
where even the minnows swim free
so I stay on the waters and cast the nets again
and wait to haul in my next catch.

nineteen in little more than a week:
already time slips through my fingers,

days trickling through the cracks
in the sidewalk, leaving

me rubbing my fingers raw against
seams in the parched pavement, wondering

when the rain will seep back up. I heard time
runs faster as you grow older,

an ever-tightening spiral of minutes days
decades blinks of eyes

and I wonder how I will bear it
when even now I am grasping

desperately for anything in reach,
anything to slow the locomotive

down, and all I get is red-scraped palms
from slapping past tree trunks,

arms too skinny-weak to pull, to hold any
branches as the train whisks me by

by-by-bye