Blue brick stone eyes,
like four leaves, I am in luck.
Liquid doesn’t drip from rock.
Not all skin is the same.
Some grow into cat-o-nine tail,
but you…
you douse poison like a God.
I am witness,
without religion,
without faith,
without hope,
out of the blue,
brick stone eyes
came to me
an old idea –
a different skin
growing on me.
I’m going to be in love tonight
under this hidden moon
in this welcome season
just tonight
as this house creaks like
seventy year old bones,
as murders grow in awful hands,
as no one sets foot on
this same carpet.
I’m going to kiss warm lips tonight
of a living man
who breathes cold opinion
and holds me in his eyes,
who clears distance from hollow
rooms,
who says nothing,
who lays unknowingly, tonight, beside me
with no one around to overhear us.
I am going to make love tonight
to a suspect of betrayal,
to my heart’s gravity,
to a memory that has been
soaking in the fall.
Listen. It is perfectly safe.
Look around.
No one is near. It has been years
since I fell asleep with
my skin underneath him, falling,
falling in to some
confession, and tonight
I will not hear a sliver of his voice
and he will not know
that tonight’s moon will
cover up his absence,
for me.
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!”
Today is nothing. Gray ghost
canvas.
Every color has been broiled
out, to evaporate in
ammonia scented windows.
The kitchen is a common place
for rainbows, for
sunlight.
How many times has a wife
picked yellow kitchens?
Stitched yellow sunflowers
into their children’s memories?
Today, the kitchen is nothing. White walls
splattered
with greasy old moments
that reflect in the glass shower walls,
in the colors
from the sun outside.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 