Faith

My love

it is so hard to keep

faith

with every day there are changing shades from day to night

sometimes I am comforted by fireflies and evening moth

who dual beyond the porch, betrayed by flicker and swat

I imagine the patterns of her wings, that magic sting of light

so short their lives compared to ours, so rich and meaningful I would infer

sometimes it is the exclusion of pain gives me rest

when I can at last unroll my carpet and forget

carrying the weight all day, a vase of ache absent of flower

to place this nowhere and have it melt away

I lie in the bath and heady steam dissipates reality

in those musings there is only the delight of a girl

seeking her passion in lingered meandered imagining

and you come to me, full of health and unharmed yet

by cruel flint and staunch of your absent conscience

and you lay me down and make of me what you will

a thousand pieces of me broken and rebuilt

which I give with my all, for you were and you remain still

far more than sense can convey

in the hour of day when dreams are gone to sleep

I see the cruelty of your take and take and take

the hunger of your keep and how I was but a thing, in your

cabinet of curiosities to be taken out and squeezed when you

thirsted or when times were hard and you needed the succor of

kindness to tuck you in, nothing of you was sincere or loving

all that I held dear possessed the sound of my own breaking

it was as if I had become pupil to mistreatment

learned many times on illiterate whip of inheritance

children soon become acquiescent to disregard

I didn’t know how to be worthy and you took my pain

pinned it to a velvet card and called me Opodiphthera Eucalypti

my blush and powder, the soft rubbed fur and bleed of color

round and round my pattern and maze, sucking from thistle

the gypsy without, I live in silk and attraction to light

pollinating only the fruit of predators like yourself

as you pinch my wings with your greed and whisper

my lunar, my atlas, spin your silken web across my longing

for I have never learned my worth and you wish to

gobble on my spirit as you may an Autumn apple

the fragrance of your dissection

my love

it is too easy

to stay my life in wait of your call

watching others continue onward and myself find

nothing but the covet and anguish of a prisoner

if I had the strength to

I’d hurl myself against the glass

leaving a smudge of myself in technicolor

for children to press their noses against and wonder

oh what ever life could make such a kaleidoscope

and in these mixings of burning and yearning

parched by want and crushed to nothing

the dancer emerges broken and fragmented

to spirit into night her ether and the longing

she is free of her torment and bound to the wax and wane

of one who has rubbed against and been caught by

a terrible rope, woven with obsidian, the shade of pain

my love

it is too hard to remain

faithful

to your brand of hurt

and live in dying with every pursuit

I have long imagined I am already prepared

for the hour, the moment, pain exceeds its curse

and slipping like oil and water and vinegar bound

we change from solid to infinity and beyond

where only the stain of who we were and what we bore

that burning need to consume, that hunger for

all the poison within your sickening and how

never did you rest until the very perish was wrought

standing still like a girl reaching for

something invisible

my love

it is the fresh unopened rose

and her tightly closed promise

shall see tomorrow and claim

the glory

for I will not be there to witness

this new day and those trespasses for this comforts

me in such a depth as if every kind of anguish

were salved by the knowledge this too shall end

and you will dissolve in time

beyond the fragment of what has been

into the very air like things we cannot yet see

whirling and catching the air in relief

for moths have never lived long enough it seems

to know their beauty and how it is

for us who live sometimes too long

and rise to see another day, alone

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Its shining watch

Then make me a tree

that I may reach through earth

lengthening root

climb up, take form

gather again, that moment shook

from memory never

where moon was twice its natural size

reflected in your angry eyes

sitting in idling car

my sticky throated youth

your still punching vigor

movement then, as taught immemorial

of lovers who are not yet.

…

watchful of your thin wrist

flickering just before touch

warm air, window down

languid stroke of time

painting all these years hence

something you have

absented from, like unpicked fruit

in turning, strange and unfamiliar

I dial that feeling

quite often

not fantasy, no

something real

painted over

turned to shellac, too hard to prize

open again

…

I watch her in time

the girl I was

wondering at her thoughts

as I know them almost

unformed and loose

like her hair, thicker and tumbling than now

the auburn xylophone of her back

I could fall in love with

each of us again

the blush of your pomegranate lips

how your dark eyes soak up light

extinguish it black

no wonder, I say … no wonder

…

yet, would I be here now?

if I had not

beseeched night in stolen lament;

if it is meant …  let her call

fate or you obey, though months had passed

a moment, as electric as fire burns oxygen

like fingers on your neck portend soft doom

female silhouettes of trees sway in night breeze

would they have whispered?

no don’t do it, don’t go, turn back

heavy keys in light fabric, jingle like steps

wide open un-rehearsed land rushing past

silence and folded roosting birds, holding their breath

…

it wasn’t lust

it wasn’t yet love

something other

we were always

in between, time and sense

every song written about

when you leaned, close enough

fusion then, a kind of glory

unspoken of to this day

sealing our fate

like flightless coin

run over many times

shall silver

in tarmac, make

an echo of the very stars

blessing

its

shining

watch

Two cars going in separate directions

What is contained in motion? In separation? In the fluid trajectory of two cars

driving in different directions

when once they drove together in one, singular and twice

with music playing like a warm stove in Winter

watchful eyes glinting at the movement of her soapy shoulders

inhaling a song they both liked

was it really so long ago? time can be a fickle fellow

you believe things have not changed before

the car wreck distorting metal into specters, and then mangled see

all the signs and wonders leading to your loss

glaring and obvious as they were not before

I would say four years, six, maybe more

since like powdered sugar you shook her

out of your system and changed the channel

you think she couldn’t pick up on the dull flat key of your promises

or the way you did not meet her pleading eye

and had someone else nearby

parked with engine still running

waiting her eventual hot buttered turn

you were bound to return to the past

as your memory dissolved through gauze

that is all that remained sharp

like a knife on my chest will cut

only so deep and then retreive

sticky piecemeal

baking it into cakes and giving alms

when we are neither penitent nor dead

but live on

in seperation

as time comes and goes like a trance

one moment I am holding a glass

of your words

believing myself loved

the next the house is being emptied

sold for next family to inhabit, my footsteps

there was a time I held onto

boxes of memories like a kite

I saw if you let go of the string

they rose higher and higher out of sight

more beautiful for freedom

now I can pack the entirity of me

in one small bag and still have room for heartache

this is the season of change

the radio host warns us of impending rain

another storm like last year and the one before

we threw sharp glances at each other until there was no more

blood left inside to keep warm

I feel no regret, only the beckon of movement

on to the future and maybe

I will not need a car where I am heading

watching the horizon bleed

its first bidding autumn evening

and I remember laying with you watching tv

in the dark, the feel of your fingers on my neck

remember reading Bridges of Madison County, thinking

surely people do not live like that

and the car

waiting at the stoplights

long after they could have driven on

blinking in humid downpour

blinking for her to get out and run toward

something already buried and underground

I hear the gear shift

watch in rear mirror

the outline of you

grow gradually thinner

against orange light

and the sound of someone

crying out

https://youtu.be/voZI8NXEO6M

Forget

Water

Tears

Blurred screens

Disconnected numbers

I lost my memory in a dish I left outside

the rain filled it up and soon thoughts

sodden and wrinkled

were illegible

It was you

you were the one dancing in the rain

you were the one who sheltered me from the storm

with your skinny arms and your little heart

It was I

who burrowed inside your cave and found

the fiery part and claimed it, kept it burning

long after the rain stopped

we lay in velvet darkness

your hand resting against my cheek

in the way only unraveled people sleep

I heard your dreams

you felt my body move

curl about you like

an extension of your desire

we contained the sum

of us

in a little boat

kept aloft by hope

when you said hope died

the flame behind your eyes

the one looking at me with such tenderness

blew out

behind in its place

soot and smoke gathered

like regretful children with dirty hands

smudging their best pictures

late summer rain drowned out

the sound of me calling

you would have heard but you had

long stopped listening

it poured, soon streets were awash

a symbol, a crucifixion, something terribly broken

something crushed underfoot, losing form

you bent to pick up the pieces of my heart

but could not read the words

for you had also lost your past and our history

I no more featured than the last time it rained

long long ago

when the trees were still thin and straight

not bent and crooked offering up their rotten roots

then you were a woman who loved someone else

I was a piece of paper

too wet to decipher

had you wanted to

and you did not

you did not

The Analyst & Peter Pan

Holding tears beneath excessive eye-make-up

not smart when pealing secrets from heartache

I noticed the Analyst had cut her hair

in Jewish faith, hair is a woman’s greatest vanity

to cut it, often a sign of extreme despair

I cut mine when I was sick, it fell like a lambs tail

to the floor in red scissored ribbons

in the mirror I looked like a shorn stranger

trying to climb out of familiar eyes

reminding me of the time I sheered it off at 16

my lover left me soon after, he did not care for short-haired girls

I told the Analyst I liked her new look

wondering if there was a story behind it

the never-never velvet glove of Pan’s world

his need not to be a he or she or have a Wendy

instead to be free as we are at ten when

nothing of this world can truly touch us

gender becomes a learned yoke in the future

she recalled her sheer days of freedom

wishing to return as we all do, to a kinder time

I do not know if I am this or that

but I know what I am not

I felt it was honest, when you do something big

there is always more of a story behind an act

I sat looking out of the small office window

remembering sitting there before

sick and heaving

thin and fat

slump shouldered, bare-faced and dolled up in war paint

I remembered

driving to you and dancing in my limbs

as I saw you look up and wink

changing the light with your smile

knowing

I will never leave that office and find you again

because you were gone even then

I just hadn’t known it

too sick, too set on denial and fever dreams

perhaps when you know you will never experience

that feeling again

it is harder to let go, watch such a large part of you, fade into background

you are grieving she said

her short hair in her face

I thought of you and the pulse, laying like a long empty road, between us

my heart squeezed with a terrible pain

children flying from an open window into stars

tears splash on my skin, like your touch

which I will not feel again in this life time

so you pronounced with granite in your eyes

and I nodded

dumbly

unable to say anything more

but watch the light

skip in and out of the small windowpane

where once I held

as much pure love

as Peter Pan

Out of Africa

Karen I think of you

pretending I know what your face looks like

ashen and sun-lit that day his plane

did not reach its destination

you knew

in that instinctive way

the weigh and measure of

incalculable things

felt twisted in our gut

like a wrung towel

retaining pressure

he was a man of air and Africa

the painted land

reaching like a hennaed bride

across plain and prairie

you can smell freedom

where we all began

born of clay and rain

growing to the rhythm of

dovetail butterflies gathering

their meal of date palm and black mangrove

yellowwood and senegalia groves leading

the mosaic paths of animals

honey bees and cicadas

drone air with song of nectar and molting

impala with their great dipped ink horns

slender heat parched bodies eyeing crest

for hyena or aardwolf staring predator

while sable antelope merge

their burgundy brown into

baked fecund earth

staring at skies for sign of rain

as you

look upward

seeing in your minds eye

his falling plane

imagine in urgent moment

greatest pain

all the years ahead you will

be without him

is death, you wonder

more merciful than life?

capturing the heart

at its perfect balance

where like a flower

you can stoop to preserve

its potency

no mind

it is the prayer of days ahead

rigid and unmoving in their sorrow

where you hold your face expressionless

howling in your mirror when all have left

and the monkey chatter

the smell of him everywhere

talking ghosts of touch, reaching, reaching out

you pretend, you submerge in that

twilight of denial and mad hope

staying long after death, the last visitor to leave

the funeral

Transplant

Your hands seemed always too small

To crush between them

Like indigo dust

The entirety of my heart

Turned to chalk

Yet so you did

A hundred times in preparation

Causing a dysrythmia of fits and starts

As a bullet will pierce and find its worst punctuation

I felt your hands

Reaching inside me and clasping my beating muscle with eagerness

Turn to calcified rock, that which adored you

Just as once you swam within my cove

A lone mermaid, protected by gentle shore and salinity of my devotion

It took too long to become aware

Of that ache and trespass

The stranger in your eyes hurling goodness out the door

An unmade resonance of your own heart

Beating further and further

Away from me like castaway beacon

For something precious, we hardly wish to give up upon

We make excuses for the continued lack

The savage dearticulate rending of gentle emotion

As this grave beseachment, that you stay with me here in this place we created

When you felt the same and held me tighter than hands borne in storm

Will cling to wreckage

I

Never let you go

I

Held on by stitching myself to you

Skin pulling against skin

Submerged and blind I feel for your shape

So dear to me and known over all the world

You who has shucked your hide and flown

As molting cicada will leave behind

Crusty exterior without whole

I was fooled by the echoes of love

And your words you gave, without conviction

I saw in your eyes the truth burning

Indifferent to me and my existence

I was no more to you than

A knot to be undone and placated

I do not know why

You could have brought the knife out and sunk it to the hilt and twisted until

That cry escaped me

as you longing to … will fight the urge to disclose

Your transplant

Why stay and pretend?

Your hands not touching me, hold by your side like wooden plough

Eying furtile crescent of low sheering moon

I am not an earth capable of disgorging life

My land is barren without your kindness

The sun turns me to whitened parchment

I write with scarlet fingers

Of your abandoned nourishment

The ebb and flow before all fluid is lost

No more the cascading ocean

Cresting high with furious need

To hold me once more, horses of foam arching overhead

I ran to the shoreline and saw your sail

Catching first gust and with all mighty exhale

Smile toward the sun, the relief of the free

Unchained from us, I hadn’t known or perhaps refused to own

How you sought your release

Shining like a newly forged key on the operating room of my transplant

No more beating heart

No more the sound of you, rushing in my blood

We amputate pain if we are strong

But I am no warrior

It is the mark of how deeply I felt

I wear my scar

A red ribbon down the middle of my chest

Where you reached, where you existed

Where you left

The undead heart

In my head

there’s a record on a turn table glossy and black

when it gets to certain grooves I recognize the play of needle over vinyl and each crackle is a familiar passage through well-worn emotion

I turn everything on to create loudness

to expunge what I hear by drowning out

the washing machine, the dish washer, the blender, the coffee grinder, the lawn mower, the radio, the alarm clock, the hair dryer

I run the bath, I run the shower, I run the sprinkler, I run the garbage disposal, I run away from the song

It has one word going round and round

one face, one memory, two memories, a thousand

a wrist with a silver bracelet on, flung in sleep against burgundy sheet

every time you brushed the hair away from my eye, every squeeze of our fingers captured, every kiss, every smile, every year I see the wave of loss it is not so far beyond turbulence

today the clouds will not clear, I get in the car, I tune to the loudest song, I scream as I drive, years burning my eyes, straining to see through my own download

If I had a name for it that name would be wreckage, ruin, destruction, destroyed, unplug  me, burn it out, scold,  defeat, disintegrate, desolate, muted, drowning and burning at once

I would be a legion of black horses sweating sorrow

I would be a night never turning into tomorrow

I would be a shroud worse than death for the one glimmer

that hurts the worst and makes you hold your breath ever deeper

a chain, a spike, a hammer, a knife

and all I felt was love

and all I wanted was you

and all I am is nothing

It plays round and round

like two hands cupping sound

no amount of running or noise can disturb

the undead heart

Within the woods

You lost your grip on reality around the same time

my own dalliance with death disturbed the rafters

my shoulders of a man, yours of a sparrow

we danced around amber whiskey bottles

setting fire to tarmac

lifting our skirts before silver ash enveloped us

but maybe I didn’t clean my feet well enough

you began to tremble in the morning

and I found I could not move

it was as if a deer had been startled

standing quite still in dried grass

he was frozen in situ

for a time I wanted to break out

resume merriment and three penny carnival

until the feeling of falling inside

behind the bones of your face

where all emotion blanches and traces

secrets and lies

became my norm

I did not know anymore

how to stir cocktails of polite acquaintance

or make small talk trace like sleepy snails

I did not know anymore

what became of my social graces

pinned and folded beneath me like taffeta

it gave me comfort to

lose my art of conversation

the yawning maw of fraternization

I listened to words and they did not

beckon me come closer

I felt as strange as the outdoor moth

who half wishes he did not

slap against warm glass trying to

eat the light

for it is not you he seeks

but the burn and blitz of some fantastic

singeing his wings in tattoo

and I too

had always yearned for that feeling

never discovered among the feeding troughs

of social intercourse

and once or twice I left

a full and heaving party

to lift my legs for a stranger in

cramped confine

because the hard bang and knock of his

emptying wood was

more honest than all the winks and nods

whispering behind my back

words

I no longer needed to use

only three ever necessary

I love you

though now you are smudged out

by burn of cinders staining toes

gone as cold as foggy morning

selecting mute I retraced my arc

pushed myself back beneath my bones

within the temple

within the woods

where the deer finally moved

from her camouflage and

sprinted light as powder

into converging dark

Mirage

If you could purchase

a weight for

my heart

it would

bankrupt

the world

for heavier

than lead

and any ore

it remains

broken in

places too

deep for

light

too

shallow

to retain

sufficient

water

we will

die thirsting

as the

mirage of

longing shows

its humor

over horizon