144.

I am all blooming palms now, opening under sun warmth
and ready to curl green tendrils around something
sweet like hummingbird feed, like sugar water
ready to plant green roots a long, long way down
to have something to hang on to when the wind blows
and to push green chutes up through fresh-tilled earth
and get it all under my fingernails, to shake my hair and laugh
while the hot dirt falls from it like fairy dust

I have kept myself indoors and potted for too long
only stretching so far upward, only toward a ceiling, no sky.
but I am learning to lift my leafy skirts and step out
toward the light, past the backyard, through the fence

and I am a wildflower now.

no more gates, no barbed wire
only the hush of tall grasses whispering to each other
and the their sway, and far horizons blending into gray from green
and the soft embrace of soil on my feet
and sunlight drawing freckles on my cheeks.

(worn)

worn like sweater-holes, like your thumbs
pressing through my skin and me
wrapping around your hands

worn like foot soles, like miles
of asphalt without flowers peeking
through the cracks

worn like forgetting you, and then
it’s years later and I’ve worn so many other
people’s sweaters, and I’m

just worn out


(composed in sixty seconds at oneword.com)

143.

crooked and bleary-eyed, slurred and sideways sitting
still askew from the last breath you blew at me, bent like a branch
head tilted almost upside-down and asking how did this happen?
how did so many midnights pass between eye blinks, between heartbeats,
head pressed to your wrist one minute and listening for your blood flow
the gentle whoosh like seashell sounds, until I open my eyes two years later
head-slam ringing without you and without
so much as a cough goodbye?
and I stretch a hand to the floor to steady myself, but
my fingers find your hair instead and I am
combing through you again
blurred vision and veered off-course, I was doing so well
I was doing such a good job of forgetting you

I am dizzy at the scent of you and sad to think
that you feel like an interruption now
instead of a comfort

To Robin, From The Rest of Us

there may be moments when you are rubbing your wrists
and they are in gold shackles, and we are singing
"O Captain, my Captain, sail home
 we are waiting for you"
and you may not hear us, trapped
in an itty bitty living space, on Arabian nights
that fall too heavy on your eyelids.
but we can see you in there, Peter, even
when you cannot remember what fairies look like anymore
and hope seems childish, and you've been a grown-up
for long enough to know when it's time to close the window.
we may be singing, "O Captain, my Captain"
and standing on school desks, waiting
for you to come home and tell us
about poetry and beauty, and romance, and love
and how these are the things we stay alive for,
and you may not hear us.
but we are still singing it anyway, because
you taught us how.

and we just want to tell you
(just like you told us, once)
that it's not your fault.

it's not your fault.

it's not your fault.

we love you.

142.

I am propped up against myself at midnight
slumped breaths shallow and insufficient, the way I was
for you. and I have scoured my memories with a magnifying glass,
the campfire with my family, the meals we cooked together
for any trace, for any clues, for anything
but I only pick up a few blades of dead grass here and there
a few empty bird shells between my fingers, and nothing
like a first sign or a beginning of an end, no indication
of what was heading for me like a truck,
not that I can remember anyway.
so I am resigned to sit here wilting
only half-drunk and half-over you
glassy eyed and wondering
(as always)
where your head's at
and what did I do wrong
and who it is you're with now
and were you really that unhappy
and why and why and why
did you never tell me
any of this

141.

you used to say such particular things to me
leaving me notes that I still have stuck in my head, repeating
like the words to the songs we listened to the first time you got me high.
we were anomalous.
you were the only one who left that distinctive wrinkle pattern
in my sheets, cradled into the crook of me, folded
like seven years gone by and the build-up and the let-down
and the little imprints still lingering on my palms
from holding your hair while we slept
and listening to your breath song.
I memorized it back then, and even still
no one else's sounds the same.

sometimes I wonder where you are now, whether
you are making lines in someone else's clean-pressed sheets
whether you even read any of this anymore
but I think there will always be at least a smallish fraction of me
that is in love with you, some nook or cranny of my heart
that still pumps your blood vicariously

I think years will continue to pass
and there will still be mornings or moments
when I feel the ghost of you pressing into my hollow curves
and there was a space that only you could fill
and it will stay vacant, I imagine.