Monday, May 13, 2019

Ten Years of Age


The girl with her viridescent fingerprints
through her first act of life,
whose ground she has paced for a decade,
traces her fingertips on the teal fences,
that come away flaking auburn powder.


Her black school shoes
with chalk-white prints
gently graze the crewcut lawn.


Her checkered dress swings in the wind,
seeds of weeping love-grass
catching on the cotton hem.


The mid-week midsummer wind
blows a thousand needle pricks
on her molten milk chocolate eyes.


She plucks a stalk
and with the same fingertips grazed from the rusted fence,
ties a knot around the iron,
tethering her plucked, withering sanity
on the fence that owned her youth.

Monday, April 15, 2019

All By Heart

The first utterance
whispered with the scent of
black rose mingled with lavender lingering in the wind,
seven hundred and thirty days forward 
and even road signs do not know 
of all the towns we have been to.

II
Last July slashed a gash 
that strapped years to me.
These trembling fingers 
that try too often to count 
the ticks of time I can’t take back,
and the saltwater that trickles down
these circles of twilight eyes 
and the violent velvet tempest tremors 
that take the voice from my throat
and leaves my chest a vacant vacuum of ember haloed gravity. 
You know them all by heart.
I read an almanac of secrets all mine in your watchful eyes. 

III
This springtime, our old stadium 
with the bolt scratches on the bleachers 
reopens for its last hurrah,
the lights brilliant like their lumens were of stolen starlight 
and we are somehow standing burnt out but star-bright,
our hands cinnamon dusted from building towers. 
You were alight with an ardent zeal,
as the songs slipped from your lips
all recalled and awaiting the strains,
you sauntered across the stage 
like it was yours to begin with. 

IV
I have been ghosting, 
been slipping in and out of daytime comatose, 
confused my soul with pineapple smoke,
pirouetting in a fog of fragmented panic and poison envy.
But each night I try drifting down to
our post-code and pretend the sun rises 
only when I want it to 
and when the illusion splinters 
the storms roam again like wild, absconding animals 
and I have yet to outrun the slithering snakes in the rising water. 

V
Still you have been the stronghold,
the anchor arms that reach meters deep,
into trenches alongside all my once-was’s 
that still prick in spite of time. 
You have built bomb shelters from
bricks of patient promises,
sanctioned in the reigning monarchy
of a soft disapproving polar bear.
In our den, I salvage enough peace 
for slumber enclosed in a hold
that will not halt winter 
but may unfreeze scarlet rivers
just long enough to relearn 
a little forgetting 
and the simple act of breathing.  

Letter From an Old Poet

 I Day two thousand  one hundred and ninety-one. Our little blue marble has made one modest revolution  around our honey-sweet sun  si...