It's Time to Join the Living

"And I have, or will, I’m not sure which,
but who’s to say how many weeks or months

are called for, because I’ve been there,
deeply there, with you, without you,

winding through the red rock cliffs, say,
in Arizona, a one-laner, all dirt and no guard rail,

driving, perhaps recklessly, the urge
to take my eyes off the road for a second,

strong, look over the edge, stronger,
or at least at the passenger seat,

empty, and so if that’s the best
I can do, to drive and hug the inside edges

of the road and not look down so be it—
I am going somewhere, the desert maybe,

and when I get off this road,
the I that I am now will still carry

the you that you were then,
or maybe you will carry me:

a hawk gliding over the cliffs
with something in its claws,

just in my periphery,
and though I want to know

if the thing that’s clutched so tightly,
so randomly, so in fact lovingly,

is dead or alive, there is no need
beyond the need to say this,

because it will not be able
to unbind itself, it will not shake loose.

I imagine its last thoughts,
if it is capable of thinking,

would be of what it’s like to be airborne,
without the constraints of gravity,

free of the thing that fixes us here,
because maybe it’s exactly the thing

we can’t release that keeps us
on this side, among the living."

Never Fully

"he never fully disappoints me

because I know him

and I don't expect him to be any more or less than who he is"

"I can still taste the shiver of realizing that movement works both ways, that if love isn't permanent, then so is it's absence, that closing a door, is not the same as locking it
twelve years later, her and I are still learning that there are no rules firm enough to keep two hearts together, or apart
there's nothing wrong with building a house that may one day be empty
with spinning a myth, and keeping it open-ended
with keeping a spare key in your pocket"

Alone

"I wasn't alone in that time

Just without you,

And I am grateful"

Do You Sleep Beside Them

""

Land To Swim To

"guilty with the blood of something beautiful

all over me

i’ve been weak and leaking so much poison

in all the rivers around me

the fish are dying

and the trees are vying for some light

but i’m the eternal night

i wasn’t gonna be just ok

i was gonna be perfect

was gonna make my love feel

like the first time you rode your bike without training wheels

kneel before you every day

like there was no one else before you

cause i’ve heard your heart beat

like that breeze that could bring any violence to its knees

and the best lines i’ve ever written

i plagiarized every word from the thoughts of yours

i heard while you were just sittin in silence

when i wanted to be eighty with you

birth babies like poems with you

and let them write themselves

wanted to hold your heart to my ear like a sea-shell

til i could hear the tides of every tear you’ve ever cried

then build islands in the seas of your eyes

so you’d see there’s land to swim to

was gonna love you so well

i’d wake every morning

and tell you things like this…

bliss is the moments you’re with me

when your gone my life hurts like hell

but i’ll do anything to make you happy

even if it means setting you free"

Arrive

"I started wishing on the stars in the sky instead. 
I said to the sun, tell me about the Big Bang. 
The sun said, 'It hurts to become.'
I carry that hurt on the tip of my tongue, and whisper 'Bless your heart' every chance I get.
So my family tree can be sure I have not left
You do not have to leave to arrive, I am learning this slowly.


For the record, if you have ever done anything for attention, this poem is attention, title it with your name.
It will scour the city bridge every time you stand staring at the river. 
It never wants to find your body doing anything but loving what it loves.
Love what you love.
Say 'This is my body, it is no one's but mine.’ 
This is my nervous system, my wanting blood, my tongue, tied up like a ball of Christmas lights.
If you put a star on the top of my tree, make sure it's a star that fell. Make sure it hit bottom like a tambourine. 
Because all these words are stories to the staircase to the top of my lungs where I sing what hurts. 
And the echo comes back."

Everything Was Overexposed

"I remember the ring you gave me, 

how I smashed it into pieces trying to decide if it was real.

What note could you have left?"
"Last night I tore the feathers from my pillow searching for the songs of the birds.
Morning came silent"

My Lost Months

"I’m sorry for crying all of the time. 
I’m sorry that you got mad, and I tried to get mad, and instead I fell apart.
I’m sorry that it was all on you to walk away. I know I didn’t make it easy.
I am sorry that I called you a coward. 
I am sorry that it is too late to tell you that I have always thought of you as being anything but.

I’m sorry that those things ever stopped being true.
I’m sorry that I still remember that you said them.

I know now that we never loved like this.
Oh, we loved, and there was so much happiness.
There was passion, and there was pain.
But it was the you that I could no longer have that I fell so profoundly in love with that I thought my veins would always be aching for a shared laugh or an intentional physical contact. 
I inflated our best times, lost a grip on our worst. 
Remember that I did this, when you wonder why I lost my mind when you left. 
Remember that I was not remembering us and our lost battles,
but only the most fleeting moments.
I thought never of the fights, incompatibility, or anger.
Only of the songs, car rides, sunsets, cliche overbearing indescribable lung-clenching love that there is no word for, while forgetting that those moments were few, far between, and may have only existed for one of us.

I am sorry for how I acted.
I am sorry for inventing a you that was impossible to let go.
I am sorry that anything left you might have been keeping with you to look back on our relationship fondly with, I dismantled,
destroyed in the fire of my lost months. 

To my old friend whom I shall never address as anything else,

I am sorry that I fell in love with a version of you that I invented.
I am sorry that I will never again know you, me, or us.
I do not know, my friend, if I am sorry about what I let waste away."

Cannonball

“You said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” So I busted cannonballs off across the ocean and back and you said, “That’s not what I meant.” I know I took things too far sometimes but I didn’t mean to pass you by. Every day I would try catching up to you. Every day you would pull me over and ask where I was going in such a hurry. By the time I realized I had missed your point I took to asking if you would meet me, way off the mark. I’d make you dizzy and hope it felt good. You’re gone now and I get it."

Loved Of Course

"i haven’t written a poem in so long
i may have forgotten how
unless writing a poem
is like riding a bike
or swimming upstream
or loving you
it may be a habit that once acquired
is never lost

but you say i’m foolish
of course you love me
but being loved of course
is not the same as being loved because
or being loved despite
or being loved

if you love me why
do i feel so lonely
and why do i always wake up alone
and why am i practicing
not having you to love
i never loved you that way

if being loved by you is accepting always
getting the worst
taking the least
hearing the excuse
and never being called when you say you will
then it’s a habit
like smoking cigarettes
or brushing my teeth when i awake
something i could just as well do

most habits occur
because of laziness
we overdrink
because our friends do
we overeat
because our parents think
we need more flesh
on the bones
and perhaps my worst habit
is overloving
and like most who live
to excess
i will be broken
in two
by my unwillingness
to control my feelings

but i sit writing
a poem
about my habits
which while it’s not
a great poem
is mine
and some habits
like smiling at children
or giving a seat to an old person
should stay
if for no other reason
than their civilizing
influence

which is the ultimate
habit
i need
to acquire"

Coincidentally

"we are a constellation of starting points

living in the image of a finish line,
but it is not our place to try and keep pace
with all of these things that we wish to feel least.”

Hour Hand To The Minute Hand

"What The Hour Hand Said To The Minute Hand

At 7:35 A.M, you lay your tired body on mine
before peeling off, like a slow band-aid.

At 8:40 you sprint home and make instant coffee.

At 9:45 we finally drink it, cold.
I finish your leftover half.

By 10:50 you are already breathless.
I live for every time we overlap.

When 11:55 comes I spend the entire minute convincing you to stay.
You never do.

By noon I put my hands on your shoulders and say, “Baby,
you’re getting thin. All this running in circles and barely sitting down to eat.”

At 1:05 you tell me that while you were gone,
15,300 babies were born.

At 2:10 you don’t say a word,
just come in and kiss me for sixty seconds straight.

At 3:15 we sit quiet, listening to rain falling everywhere
in the world at once: all 15,000 tons.

At 4:20 we pull a little from the tight joint I keep behind your ear.
You do not inhale.

At 5:25 you meet me for happy hour.
My neck already salted, a lime wedged in my teeth,
a shot of tequila sitting on the bar.

At 6:30 I hear the ticking.
I count your heartbeat like seconds between thunderclaps.

By 7:35 I can see you in the distance,
each second a tease until you drape over me.
We always love quick and you never let me hold you.
I dream of drinking you through a straw.

At 8:40 you watch my beard grow 0.00027 of an inch.

At 9:45 we do not speak.
Too many people have died since we last met.

At 10:50 we pray for a meteor,
at least a clumsy kid to spill sugar in our gears.

11:55 is my favorite.
We’re only apart for mere minutes.

But at midnight you’ll apologize sixty times
because it will always be like this.

At 1:04 AM I am already sleeping.
It’s exhausting loving someone
who is constantly running away."

I Can't Walk A Straight Line

""
"They say the womb is where we learn love, is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck."

You Were Good

"I know the parts of your past that haunt you the most
are the days you weren’t being yourself,
and I know that’s why most of your past haunts you.
There were so many who found you out,
and they were right.
You were good."

If The Only Thing We Have To Gain

"I have never met a heavy heart
that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside
some people will never understand what kind of super power
it takes for some people to just
walk outside

“You- You stay here with me, okay?

You stay here with me

If the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other
My god that is plenty! 
My god that is enough!
My god that is so so much for the light to give
Each of us at each other’s backs 
Whispering over and over and over,
“Live! Live! Live!”"

And Nothing

""

The Sun Has Become

""

I Could Almost Taste

""

Daffodils And Tulips

"Daffodils and tulips cannot share
the same vase.  Daffodil sap poisons the sweet,
spring bud.  Soft, beautiful things can kill
each other too."

Movie Theatre

"The good time is a picnic on water, 
or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos 
and no one hushes when you talk through them. 
When you play my videos I throw milk duds at the screen
during the scenes I watch myself letting you go."