waxing gibbous.
Sometimes I wonder what it even means to be here
I step outside and know unequivocally
sometimes when you’re talking I remember I’m strong
strong enough to hold the weight of you learning who I really am
sometimes I think we might kiss
but I’m afraid that would put me on an escalator
I guess kissing and escalators aren’t overly related
sometimes I think you’re changing
and with familiar disappointment I realize you haven’t
you aren’t but I am, constantly, every hour,
dreaming of being with her, quiet, together, blissful- all too aware of what it took to find peace, the same peace we shared as children
sitting in truck beds and elevators and on folding tables,
all the places we made a home for our love
the one who first wrote me poetry
and embraces me in every season and who always so tenderly finds me
for t., pt.2
I was jealous of the way your name ended in -er. I wanted to know myself the way you did when you walked out of my house for the last time.
monotone.
What could be worse/than finding you/a month before/the full moon/that asked me/to relinquish your sacred being/right back to her./we were alone for the first time when I thought, Is this what it’s like to be with me?/and not in the sense that you could ever be anything other than other,/and yet I’m daring to believe/that your wholeness and my wholeness/are gazing at one another with love./I allow you to be my teacher/and I welcome you into my story/for as long as you’re meant to be./ and I don’t resist the upending nature/of how you take your time
beg.
Belly full of
Bowl of
What looks like food
But tastes like belonging
And nothing to claim for it
The way you returned to me
Agonizing wonder in your eyes
And half a vote of confidence
I need you
I need you
I need you
For breathing?
For thinking?
For fighting off illnesses?
How about next time you fall to your knees and ask to have freckles in your next life, ask to sail past the vineyard, ask to have your divinity back.
I’m tired of asking for you.
untitled.
I begin slowly shutting myself away from each part of the house that no longer feels viable. To remove one’s presence from a room, the lights are off and inextricably linked to the groans coming from the roof above. I’m already so far that I don’t hear her. I’m already so far that I can breathe.
dirty words.
A poem is something that rhymes.
Like when your wanting is becoming your life and you feel so full of -
Despondency, a jump, skip and a hop,
Right when you’re about to reach the -
End of this was the last time I’d ever see you,
And my god are your eyes so piercingly-
Dark and divine
And all that may crawl up your -
Elaborate towers and unbelief
Even though we all thought you’d wallow in your own -
A pool, of your own making; I took a dip once
It was a swarm
Shame on me for thinking
The sun might’ve made it -
Fucking brighter than I’ve ever seen
Filled with stars
Beyond us, almost all the way to the planet -
home. Where I first found the absence of god.
Underneath my fingernails like all this rotten-
And on top of that you’re glowing a warm blue spine, sodded and bent, mars dusty and perfect grief, like the day you decided to use all your favorite dirty words at once.
olive pt.2
i drove home
burbank blvd
and other boulevards i can’t recall
singing songs about hating you
or hating how much you made me cry
LA is magic
and we’ll stay together
for 3 too many octobers
and I’d go to the desert
to ask my questions
hot enough to dream
of a world where I belong to myself
the only place I could go on living
you kept clawing at my throat
the way I wanted you to in the dark
the way you’re trying to do now
palm/.
you were a scandalous mess and I thought that was the dream: long hair, an apartment, two shoes on two needy feet.
you were a beekeeper, entertained by the raging rivers rushing through your mother’s kitchen.
you were a cop-out backpacker’s castle of wailing red flags, and I held on to your inhaling and exhaling. I kept them in my wallet every year because i believed we’re all indebted to the chasms of one among seven freckled children, but you didn’t look up.
you asked me to endure the crumbling that centuries bring, the frustration of a growing flower, and the only time you were afraid was when I almost left with a valley-carving shepherd.
i sang to you a folk-song no one had ever written, and in return i found bloody knees and a stone with the inscription, “the birds wait for no one.”
climb and don’t come back, unless you’ve wept.
where you live is what you become.
except for a few brief weeks,
I never went back.
“didn’t you like it there?”
Yes. But it was not home.
I’ve known since I was 17, I couldn’t sleep and the air was cool and I hadn’t even met you yet. I knew that night and every one since that if anyone could find beauty here, I would see it, be captivated by it, and never want to leave.
I didn’t tell anyone in the house. I wanted to wake them and say, “I will always be here: or near at least.” But I’m glad I let them sleep because it all turned out so differently.
The shit you said to me opened up the door to something infinitely more important than loving your stupid ass – loving myself.
for d., in 2 parts.
part 1
angular. and turbine
the only way I could imagine describing how you looked
I at once sterile, imploding, racked with grotesque commitment, guilty elsewhere
if it was today: would you have noticed: would you have asked: would I have been awake for the whole thing:
part 11
you are one of the few I might ask for in my second life
if we could find our modern selves together in a room, at least to laugh at what has been
the warmth and sharpness of your tongue
the heaviness of my feet walking away from you twice
the old road on a cold December morning
bowling ball.
Everything about this is either frozen, or divine
And I changed my mind so many times for you
And I moved past your unconscious body, willing you not to wake
And I offered you what little I had
Everything about me, no longer
we don’t bite.
these hollows shaped like my fears the same: dense
these hollows, my fears the same: dense
these hollows and my fears at once: dense
brooding
over the shoulder of
an honest lover
dove-tail into
flood and fleece
wining and dining
looking into floor plans that are a bit too large
it could all be shit
or if i could’ve laid in the grass with you forever, that might’ve been it
don’t save it.
Heaven is now, my love
it’s 15 shades of green,
soothing my worn sight,
a cup of tea to hold and savor
it’s the sun and moon dancing above,
reluctant to depart from one another
it’s the silence, not only of the land,
but also in my spirit
it’s feeling my freckles absorb the warmth of autumn
and realizing that I’m just a visitor
in an elaborate ecosystem that nourishes and destroys
it’s the morning greeting of a baby tiger
resting against your leg in the shade
I no longer lie to myself: I will not be Happier later than I could be right now.
All I have to do is be here.
This is all there ever is.
1977.
I feel like I have very little to offer you - flexible hamstrings if you need a pair.
In this way, I’m forgetting that the magic washing over me, embalming me, expanding my senses when you smile and you speak - is the same that was in the room when my brother and I were born.
I will never tire from hunting that down in everyone I meet.
for e.
you say them so effortlessly
and I wonder what it was like for you to grow up
without a cage around your tongue.
your father strikes me as a man who raises his voice behind closed doors,
and yet maybe it was done with you and not toward you.
I’m concocting a story about you and him
because I lack experience from which to draw on.