In the end, all that sleeps against your fresh
youth is an echo.
After the last words slide across instant
regret, the only thing that spends Saturday
mornings with you are the bones
of an old Review.
After tonight,
just remember the way your fingers interlocked
like you figured out a combination
of perfect timing
and lust.
Just remember, that’s all it was.
Three minutes in – I am a dream.
Have you ever been met
by a mirror? Twisted like
eyebrows in confusion.
Steel eye compartments
ready for battle.
Nail my head to the floor,
my only choice is to look up
to neighbors…
to enemies.
The minutes slice off the clock
as we talk – I am imaginary.
She sees me with her husband,
white t-shirt sucked to my
chest, wet from digestion –
I am the dark apple.
My bags are packed, my body
on 90 miles per hour.
The hidden highway – I carve three minutes in-
distressed almond skinny
dipping in shame.
Have you seen me today?
Have you looked in the mirror?
I spend a thousand blinks on old memories.
Each taste like cocaine
broken teeth, pressing
truth against my cheek, a cold shock
like this one –
crying on the beach, sleeping in empty sea shells.
My mother eats her hands,
choking on emptiness,
on regret – I understand,
then –
fireflies above my nose.
Bathing with my naked sisters,
collecting our shadows full
of sea water – and with a rush of the moon
a tip of years comes rushing back
and I choke, not on emptiness
but on regret, and I understand
then –
it’s the same sun that passed away,
roasting flames with me on
Sunday; and what does He do?
He moves.
Darkness is the culprit that lingers behind
each slice of sweet Nectarine.
I am late.
I’ve been here before.
The other side of love.
The place that dissects the tongues
of former lovers
and turns them into layers.
love on
anger on
love on
hate on
jealousy on
love
on poison liquid every night before we stumble to sleep
with the darkness that caresses our feet
and convinces us that we love ourselves
to much to live on the other side.
I am late.
I’ve been here before
where I could feed you Mercury
while the sun sets on us forever.
I’d caress your feet and pray to the darkness
to take you far away
from my love.
The best part of the sun, where it melts away for its own reflection.
To prove something.
We stand in snake skin and
leopard print, digging for
bones of the extinct
while money blows up the noses
of our youth.
I thought about you today.
Your early reflection smoking
life into you,
black coffee lungs watching the sunrise bring life into
the rest of us.
My skin is hanging up now.
I am melting away for my reflection to do the same.
To prove something.
Some eyes open like black holes,
gravitationally throwing memorial stones through a moment,
letting time break a silence that lingers in every muscle,
every finger tip
for a soft crash of acknowledgment.
Other eyes move like flat lines and we must guess. Ache drips from our palms like candle wax, hot with the stench of regret
and blame.
I remember the first taste of his
time, brutal pine in November’s icy driveway. I know his eyes opened
to our flavor together,
but now he walks in such a quick
rush; as if the Earth might split without eating him up
and he talks,
like voices do
when they should,
but not one blink wrinkles,
or speaks,
or loves.
I never had been born. It was old hands
that sketched my frame. Hands that knew how to suffer
wisely. It was a gift
to my bones, a curse that shifts
with weight and time.
Clocks wait on scales to tip time. I am rushed.
Blood cycles through my life.
Old lines outline my eyes. I am timed.
I slept with a man
and was traced. He recreated me; my child.
My simple face on a prettier canvas.
I didn’t wish for this.
I didn’t dream.
She just belongs to me.
I drag my bones along aching seas
each step pains deeper with memory,
with time.
Dark lines shade over mine.
They try to erase me
From my bones, I cry.
I cannot be
an easy sketch of a memory.
It harms me so loud and still,
the sweet departure of
a man and
the worms rolling about.
My window grants lengthy
gossip,
a red haired indiscretion
on his lips,
his soft offering
on a great night,
in a devil’s way.
He drinks like manslaughter,
his pleasant flee to the clouds;
to the moon burning out
his own execution.
We range from youth to wisdom,
he and I,
my blessing is here,
splintered between floor boards.
He is on his way out.
The worms vomit tar around
my window sill,
we slip together in service, but
he keeps a foot on the back door.
Sleep has a price that
I pretend not to notice,
close my eyes,
and should he have loved me,
I’d pity his silence and
let the worms have him.
It is always the moon whispering
with foul breath to me,
while stars drip like bad oil
paint, chips in a perfect, black sky.
The sun doesn’t say anything. It just sits
in its place, waiting for the day
it can finally rest.
I let the sun go, on its own,
but I try to join the night.
I try to wrap my body, like silk, around
time that sleeps,
that nods with my conversation
and smiles
in agreement.
We speak a language together, of
the deep ocean’s waves of regret
that cry into the dry sand of nostalgia,
creating mud of desire,
longing for its peaceful aquatic home
below the drama of tides;
of every shadow that
slices through jealous silence,
lonely crickets,
hollow frogs,
desperate bats free of their caves;
I will never be involved with a burning star –
I am part of the night.
I am a dead reflection of light
watching the world sleep.
Tonight, I peel indifference from my face
and hang it up for tomorrow.
Ice is melting. A flood will take me soon
as my body tries to mend. A two-inch puddle
of regret is enough to drown in.
I can never go home again.
One day, I might rent a floor in a busy city.
I might spread my nerves around just enough
to find them.
I will step quickly, palpitate on
hard wood, and scrub off old footprints
that walked there before me.
Empty space for my Self to rot in.
I will peel the skin of potatoes and think
of the last time I kept someone warm,
and like my face, I will lay the skin aside,
to shrivel and dry, as I,
and home will become so long ago,
from a place where my body was fresh, but cold,
from a time when a young man whispered his flames
against my bare shoulder, and
I fell in to him and froze.
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