Memories fade too.

Love another tribute

After my mom died I would consistently sit down and write poems that began with, "in the event that you have been for two weeks, one month, three months, one year, three years..."

I can't do that anymore. All I can do is write another letter to love telling it what a fickle friend it is, but in the end I'd never dream to live without it.


Six years love and is this how you teach a heart that
there is no such thing as forever?
You pull pages from library books and
Pocket marbles you didn’t win
Somewhere a telephone book is missing the entire ‘Smith’ section
And you don’t believe in regrets.
Love I have watered my palms in the swirling stream of your
Eternal youth and watched my reflection age
As you slither away down shore
I float face up in a tangled beach
As your brown body mixes my desire
With sand and feeds it
To children who’d rather
Kick beach balls and finagle crabs on to fingers
That have never been pinched.
Love you slip out quiet as smoke rolling out of car windows
From lit cigarettes and vanish
Almost as quick.
Now I hide the lines of my face behind sun glasses and try not to remember
The feel of an ocean swell.
The salt that sticks to skin.
One open palm that still harbored the hope
Of expectation.

Breakups:

I seemed to know more about them at 16 than I do at 26.

stolen clip from a longer piece:

in the end, in your boredom you move

right through me like ghosts

through the woodwork of houses,

like termites chewing away at my beams,

jaws full of sawdust and this is how I speak to you,

empty palms and toothless,

my meanness spilling out on your shoe

and you wipe it away like a stain.

The stars at night.

I can't help but think...

That I shouldn't edit poems from my freshman year of college. Those documents feel like a mausoleum that should not be disturbed out of respect for something that is past.

the long night

I.

my god, my god.

the empty space when I speak;

the hood of a car folded crisply in half like a sheet

with glass on the concrete like snow.

shattered china, superglue and stitches;

an irreparable structure that fractured itself at the seams।

there’s a weight in my heart that is never enough

and I shouldn’t have to be doing this;

the stillness of bed posts building shadows in rooms

as I rinse my eyes out with salt; sinking in wounds and it stings,

a lashing of words when nothing is there

but the bare skin of backs to the whip।

II.

today I may as well be the floor

or the clothes in the corner.

you grasp my wrist and we speak of the slow death

and the blood running dry in our veins.

we are no longer people

and these are the nights that will never end।

what is there to bring him back --his toothbrush,

a shirt. I may as well be something he forgot,

a light he will turn off in the morning; the stove,

still burning in an empty house.

Sometimes it seems I never say (said) the right thing to you.

I betrayed my own language
the vernacular of pictures sold for profit
and petticoats
I have never smoked
although I have low standards.
my bars are vertical and easily slipped
through when I feel the need for
escape.
I have stopped trusting my fingers.
They do not move in directions familiar
to my face and my mouth
I have spent more time waiting
to hear you speak than I have
taken my own tongue out
to play it is locked
in a suitcase it is
wearing a training bra and braces
hoping to make you smile by how
pink it is.
I do not trust it
to speak right.