I Love Her More

She has a name hanging
in a back orchard somewhere.

Cowbells are ringing. I gave it up
like an omelet to a woman married
to perfection.

I am missing limbs for limbs,
heart for heart. Who am I to promise
life to another broken life?

Her name stands on a balance beam
between two tongues, heated tongues,
a melting puddle of ownership.
Where did she come from?
Where does she belong?

Tug-of-war. I own her more.
Someone who should have been born
is hanging in a back orchard somewhere.

I let her go. I love her more.

a life of a ghost man

It is hard to believe in a dead man,
a ghost,
a life,
a life of a ghost man….

a life that hands my limp direction
over to those that can control it.

They must have told him,
the people,
that his core was rotting,
that his brain was infested and crumbling?

That his daughter was sick with
raw nerves and would never get better?

If the bombs in Vietnam hadn’t sawed his
spirit away,

if his own father
hadn’t dangled lily liver from
the ceiling,

maybe he would have heard
the people,
the ghosts,
the whispers of his daughter’s twisted,
raw nerves grasping
for contact

and saved me from rotting with the same
crumbling infestation.

Morning Greets Me

Each morning greets me differently;
she kisses my cheek for love, or
spits down my throat for some other reason.
I used to hate her obnoxious light.
When I was a child I threw sticks
at her and swore I would do myself
in before she could. I made rope from vines
that her sun rays grew. I gathered
poison that lived on her sickly Earth
and piled them next to my bare toes
as they dug deep through the planets
coarse skin.
I think I sat in this spot, with my back toward
her for years on top of years.
She burned and blistered through my anger,
but I couldn’t see.

Until, one morning, my daughter greeted me,
sat softly next to my feet and reached deep into
the pile of poison
that I’d been saving for me.

Incarnation

She would rather I be an incarnation, a flower
on a grave. She made my slumber rough with
sand until I swept it out of my bed.

When I was small, I brought all the worms
and the flies
and the bees
out of the water with the last bit of life
they had left.
For the ones who didn’t survive,
I gave proper burial with mermaid songs.

She never told me that mermaids cannot sing,
and she never picked up
a stick to
dig a grave with me

because I am not re-used bones
and skin
and life.

Frozen Pond

I have no room of my own. My carpet
was eaten by a vacuum with cold, blue
eyes.

It was January when kitchen plates
shattered. My diamond party,
shattered.
My calm-moon baby,
shattered.

I took her down stairs,
three times to
the snow.  We walked.

To an icy snow pond. Cold
like those eyes we left
three flights up, alone, with a balcony
and needles filled with snow.

We did not skip.
We did not hold hands.
We held breath and
walked into the pond.

I only had two hearts
because she had
one
of her own. Deep pink.
Beating on her own.

Deep.
Deeper.
Through sharp water cold.
Piercing cartilage, straight
through bone.

We gazed through crystal, an open
body,
singing laws of the nameless,
her,
freezing within me.

It is May now, plates have been cleared.
Cuts have scarred
deeper than bone. We are froze in that pond, but I have only one heart now.

I am alone.