Midnight

I often sleep through your midnight hour,
falling in love again with each dream.
In passing seasons you become more present,
or less, rarely staying for the monotony of my days.
I have not given you the clippings of wings,
or boxes full of memories.
I have given you hours and days, tangles of
emotions and desires, a handful of what
I once was.

Skin

I eat the fruit of my father's tree
and prosper without purpose.

I may name her struggles,
yet never know her pain. 

Division

Each night she dreams of leading
the resistance.
She sleeps in fields of daisies;
they come and go
with fresh growth, later withered brown
and broken.

A single bullet strikes,
the onset of new seasons.
Blood blots in outward patterns,
seeping to stain
fresh linens and virginal skin.
She succumbs each time to
the great machine, marching
on without a beat.

Must we labor for our existence
and accept a punishment
not our own?

Habit

I have always collected friends
like old habits, kept close and cured
with kindness.
Like most ailments in the world.

You hold on to tattered novels, lines
read and reread in hopes of finding new mornings,
a sunrise in which to bask, in body or imagination.
How many were the same I took breath from,
held close, made a part of me.

There is a yet bridled adventure in your eyes, a wild
to be unleashed, perhaps in the Appalachia.
Conquer the hills, and taste
what it is, to be you.

Definitions of Home

We have evolved as time
will naturally have us do;
new paths, yet the same feet and
hearts passing through.
That poignant memory we didn't realize
would ebb on us, persistently
demanding we heed its calls.
You remind me of what I once was, and where
we once thought we would go.

How we have passed through frames
and fumbled with the seams of our lives,
forgetting and remembering - siblings, lovers, friends
as emotions suspended in time.
Remove your hat and lean upon the mantle,
kick your feet up and rest a moment upon the
ever-evolving soul. A package carried
through each circumstance -
at times half unwrapped, or tied tightly with string.

We mostly come undone when we are
at home with our surroundings. We take a
breath and extend our stories for laughing,
evoking, sharing in a gesture and embrace.
I breath in new nostalgia,
a definition of home. 

Sunrise

In the end, she did not make it.
How you feel when the sun rises,
casting its beams across our sheltered,
quite face - a reprieve comes rarely,
at the most inopportune moments.
Hands clasped together, she will
take steps through the desert, the
rainforest, the never-ending abyss.
At the end of the tunnel, there is
another tunnel. And then another, etc.
Trivial. Fleeting. Emotion bare to the
walls that watch her break her fists
against concrete and analytical tension. Where will
she take her rest, make an exit, glide
gracefully from the room?
Speaking of disappointment and the
solutions to our human[ness] is like
being chased down by the CIA. Let go, run off,
shot down, chewed up, taken out
back and beaten without mercy - we are
cogs, hands, labor, wisdoms, adamant
seekers of truth, acceptance;
that thing called love.
She took the stones in her hands,
skin translucent, trembling vessels;
she hurled them to the moon, without
hesitation.

To Be With You

With letters of my past lovers pasted
on the walls of my labyrinth, calling upon my
inability to satiate hungers for the unknown,
I pace between the evidence of lucidly
failed attempts at love. Tilting my head
back, I cradle the memories of nights
spent with unknown souls, pawing and
wading through similarities, commonalities -
anything to grasp and forge bonds;
hand pressed against leg, warm and
moist to the touch, daring to pass barriers we
keep; making small spaces between
fingers like they were souls coming together
after decades apart; movies shared and repeated,
cherished and recreated, after a meal cooked together.
Unfulfilling adventures, repeatedly left lonely
to the night’s cold grasps, with only our truths.
I wrap myself into you, like the folds of linens after
they’ve hung to dry in the crisp spring breeze.
Perhaps these are the arms, after years of holding
and fumbling for words; there will be no after-image,
sad memory, old photograph reminisced upon and over;
with clarity, I take you in - the sail pulled taught in the
wind, moving ship and soul forward - we may find our
worlds weaved together. End of night does not come,
together always - bobbing up and down, laughing at our
insecurities, presenting our hearts as a sturdy mast, exploring depth
and breadth of what it is to be. With you, A Lover, captivated
by the swell and relief of the tides in the sea.

Standing Alone

If you give me a reason for talking
about the red of her hair, I will begin
with an explanation. For in her hair
there hides the truth of her past
and future identity. Irish eyes and
pale complexion leave us vulnerable
to sunlight always, for the entirety
of our lives, even when attempting
to burn out genetics with long
strong doses of sunlight. And yet,
you cannot convince her to come
inside, even for a little while.
The hours spent building up
financial stability and the large satisfaction
freckles and tanned skin are little in
comparison to the cancerous skin it
may later produce. And when that
day comes, the money will be gone
and the youth will have fallen;
all left is wrinkled skin and the stock-
pile of memories in the back of my
room. And I’m standing here asking,
as I always do, about everything and
everyone: is it worth it? Are we bound
to live without regret, or will we all
wake up to cold-sweats in the middle of
the night, cursing our previous selves for
every infraction, mistake, sin. I can only
hope we are not bound to such futures
if dissatisfaction, I can only hope those
futures will not find us standing alone.

Taking advantage of the moment of the muse,
I splay across the floor of my bedroom
stretching arms and bending limbs, wondering at
the postures translated into slender strength.
The crickets chirp outside, purely for the
enjoyment of listening to their own voice -
reminding me of summers spent with windows open
at the bottom of mountains in Pennsylvania.
At times we are handed gifts, and although they
often go unrecognized, we carry them with us
always, collected in our boxes of histories to prove where
we were and when, what our lives were like- it’s Proof!
I hold in my hands the necklace of gold flecks concealed in their
small glass orb, the greatest accessory for any hipster,
except that mine comes from a grandmother now passed.
Does it matter that my hands can guide her antiqued
sewing machine, the one she sewed her wedding dress on
at 16, sewed curtains, my mother’s childhood clothes.
Does it remember what her hands felt like,
bending over again to do the work of a determined woman.
I like to think all objects, all spaces, have a memory of
those who once made use of or inhabited them. Like how
I felt the souls, sad or lonely or alive, still existing in my apartment
when I moved in nine months ago. Aftereffect, afterglow, afterwhatever.
On evenings when I find you break the monotony of
repeated sunrise and sunset, pointing them out with a song
about dusk, I cannot help but hold my breath in anticipation;

Nobody but Ourselves

Fingertips

feel the world like hot cold madness

running across our spines and stomaches.

My.

fingertips

gather into circles and take skin

like it's their purpose. Perhaps it is.

The flesh hangs deep and raw,

it holds our guts and chemical existence.

The flesh hurts temporarily,

quick to burn, quick to heal.

My hands are momentary, our hands are infinitely slow

during short lifespans.

The memory is thick and diluted,

like split-pea soup from Italian grandmothers

with more fashion sense than me.

Dipping fingers into thoughts is like adding

poison to the perfect pot, prepared with

care. Let's not spoil the spoon-fulls before

they reach flesh-filled tongues and stomachs.

Behind your eyelids, behind your navel,

behind the fruit flies that love the leftovers of your lunch

there are bags of delicious emotions, tantalizing

thoughts, feelings that are split between days and

nights and times when there is no differentiation

between sleeping and awake.

The dream came from the stomach aches and

fruit filled dessert you ate in the dream

about Alice and her rabbit.

I chased them deep, into the pores of

our existence and placed cannonballs

at the base, to block their progression.

Your face is solid, molded, elastic.

In ten years the stretch of the imagination

will still span your consciousness of existence,

with shrieks and shivers and solidarity peppered and sprinkled

like confections at Christmas time.

We hold our breath and dive,

clasp our hands and grin,

fall asleep above bodies of water

and outside our minds the lights

stretch on; can you touch them?

Once I touched the light and laughed

because someone once told me

I have it; I still don't know what 'it' is.

But 'it' began in our bellies and erupted like

the most devastating volcanoes, the ones we studied

during freshman year of college and pretended

to understand the consequences. What happens

when our lives bubble up and erupt from our eyes

and ears and mouths and noses-

the wold we hide behind layers of clothes

and deny separation of skin and muscle;

the Jazz music brings you a little closer to

the heart of old existences.

The light is laughing with me.

There are no answers to the greatest questions of our lifetime,

but I'm wondering: who is still asking, anyway?

We all need to read a little more and sleep a little less;

join my madhouse, my lock and key apartment,

my made up magnetic surfaces with mystical

animals and mapped out dreams;

we come together, hand-in-hand.

We're all born with the same dreams.