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.

When It Snows In The Desert…

there is no grace. Each flake is a poisoned needle
jabbing in my skin.

Every sting of winter is a piece of
her blue eyes,

and
his blue lips barely parted in a box.
I imagine his last breath and
wonder if it felt like Winter,
if it felt like the cold prick of
hell jabbed into his veins.

Winter has chained me to the past.
What is lost weighs more than everything
Winter has ever given.  I imagine her singing,
and if she sounds like Summer.

I know that I am here now, and I can never go back,
but still, I wonder,
when it snows in the desert.

I Think I Was Never Born

I think I was never born.
My hands are a man’s whose body
escaped Vietnam, but whose
soul was eaten by a war.
I watch these hands dip
a rag in bleach to scrub away
a face of imperfections,
a face that is not mine,
but a man’s who was scalded
by the hot palms of a red-headed woman
who watched her husband
tie off his neck and give it to his son,

and now my daughter is not mine,
and her smile is not her own,
but of a woman who would have
drowned me in her breasts
had I been born,

and I watch her with
eyes that seem to be my own, but
crinkle like the skin of
a man who shrunk himself enough
to fit inside a bottle of Rum
and swim for forty years,

and I was not born, but I remember seeing
these hands wrapped around me,
and this face smiling,
and this blue eyes crinkling,

and all of these dying before
I could have been born.

Good Bye

I woke up in a puddle with his memory
wrapped around me. The angels were heavy tonight.
I welcomed him back from the dead tonight,
but he did not welcome life.

He must have been tossed down from Heaven,
after riding Angels bare-back. His jaw was clasped tight,
reminding me of December when the snow fell so
hard that it dug into the backs
of the trigger happy.

We watched death fall out together, a few flights
up, before he dropped the dog on his tail.
Life must remind him of amputation now.

He took me to his rickety, flimsy boyhood.
I scolded him about the thin boards
nailed together clumsily,
and told him that this was not a safe place to be.
He protested it’s security.

He never asked for his old things, but I had them.
They were treasures.
Old t-shirts, books, jewelry. My frustrated fingers
rummaged through
everything that he could have come back for.
But, he did not want.

I told him, “do you know what it is going to do
to me if you die again?”, then I realized that he did not breathe,
or pulsate, or belong…

my eyes began to flood, and then I heard a voice,
from silence,
from life,
from inside…

“Oh!  This is her saying good-bye!”