the stars, the sea, and sleep.

Monday, December 4, 2017

The Hill

These words always find a way to you
The way this morning brushes between the threads of your thin curtains
The way the city groans as it rolls out of bed
The way I find my rest stiff-pressed atop your sheets

A guest to the normalcy
With a name tag that reads anything but.
I was a friendly ghost in an open cage,
Living out of these years turning a blank page

A loose pen clenched between my teeth
Had let two cabs excuse the blues of the city
That poured in its night as I pored over its light
And counted the embers as the fog rolled in

These words always find a way to you
Pressed firmly between the hardcovers of time,
Stained in equal parts mint tea and wine,
Left somewhere in this room that’s neither yours nor mine.
Singing in harmony, forgetting our parts
Sitting in series, and running apart.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Consume

Each and every uncovered, speckled swatch
That splayed across my glassy eyes
In a coat of fresh Krylon,
Dripping in mischief as I delinquently pored
Over the rivers running by your fragile smile:
Sincere, delicate, and ignorantly misread.
In silent overstep of your insisted context,
This withered well was filled with stale light
Shared by what tethered love is momentum in time.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

)|

Coincidence.
Fate for the faithless, faced with the fear of committing to luck
Or whatever it was that struck my heels.
It stood me still while you flooded my eyes with your emerald light
And soused my lungs in a curious tide.
I blindly hoped and breathlessly pondered
If these warships slowed enough as they passed in the harbor,
If this morse stalled our course enough to anchor on each other;
So much for declaring independence.
I was an over-spoken fiction with self-prescribed bookmarks,
Holding onto whatever truth could be pressed between the hardcovers of time.
But you were a textbook tangent poorly assumed asymptotic,
Gently brushing against otherwise parallel lines.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Opposing Locomotives

So, how exactly did you find yourself
Spread so thin and folded along the center
Divided somewhere in between your god and his country,
Your faith put on display.

Gesturing toward the tradition,
We were gravel cars running lines through the night,
Unfaltering in our momentum,
Screeching on rails as gravity commanded our direction.

I may never come to know the weight you carried under your breath,
A definition of love that barreled blind in your own light.
But as my own, we still carried as a chorus,
Rattling down what we had buried in the ground
And hooked into my waist as I belted from the pews.

My congratulations and condolences,
We cannot stop running in fear of falling,
But we're gasping and grasping for the radio
Calling out despite the static
To have faith despite the vacancy.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

March First, with Hands, and Heart

Hey, hi, hello.
Not tonight, but later, 
As I'm sure you know.

I wondered how the couch got so small
And how your harmonies sunk into my side
Even when you didn't need to know the words.
They were given to you and you smiled through it,
And that was enough.
To compare and contrast
Projections and mirrors,
You casted us under the light of recent events,
And with your razor sharp pen,
Etched a harsh outline, said,
"We are not them."

It was true, we were exposed, I was embarrassed
As I washed off excess ink
To draw out this exception with an omission:
You'd shown a light so that I shone more.
On an arduous path to reconciliation,
With sweat in our palms as they worked in each other,
We worked with each other until the wolves got sick,
Put down the pen, and picked up a brick.
There were now years back as far as we could see,
Revised plot holes with dated bridges in our explicit history.

Another seven, it seems,
From shattered glass, spilt coffee, and ground spices.
Confessions selfishly stuck,
While all was selflessly forgiven
In what was intertwined and pressed against soft boundaries
Somewhere between the alcohol and the fog,
Spoken so closely as to touch
Gently, discretely, intentionally, in confidence.

And that was it.
Mutually assured,
Waiting for a return address.



Monday, January 9, 2017

Handwritten

It was a Monday,
The salted, cracked roads blurred into a cotton dry sky.
We waited for snow,
And worked until the storm's gaunt fingers
Slowly dragged against the horizon.
We then meandered to our cars
Where each breath stayed with us,
Suspended in air as lethargic as ice.

At the time,
You were the last words on a page half-full,
Turned over on the stitches buried into the seam
That made the line on which I blindly walked.
But yours found their way across the states;
Their paths were blood red, but in black was my name,
More familiar than I could remember.

You were the brisk winter air that slid past the door,
I was my keys in the box and the cold marble floor,
No longer grounded,
But flying over our homes.
Ours to each other,
Nothing more than a node
Obsoleted by return addresses.

Soused in hope, yes, this was enough,
But I would give it all to you.
So I respectfully damn all of this wonder,
In favor of the truth.




Tuesday, January 3, 2017

La La Land

On her pretense,
We shared a green bottle of white wine
As we drowned our innocence in misplaced courage.
And the dull orange glow of your streetlights
Danced on your lips as you took it all in.
Now handed to me, still warm from your clutch,
It wasn't much, but it was love.

Love that I drove for you into the ground,
Just to see what he could dig up.
But time will erode as the one that I navigated,
And from what was woven

You fabricated a truth,
Pained,
Like the growth we had,
All grown too,
Familiar with.

As did the night fray,
And you pulled apart stitches;
Your wounds wouldn't heal,
So you just let them breathe.

And although these walls expand,
There are four corners to this house,
Nothing more, nothing less,
Rooted deep in soft sand,
Held together in silence,
Held as long as the time that had passed
Since we last felt like giants.

It seems to take a lifetime to stop the fall
When we tangle in our strings,
And tighten knots from moving on.
Though no promise can be buoyed
In a sea of tugging uncertainty,
We look forward

At a benevolent city,
Dwarfed by the light of angels,
Above which I made my climb.
Looking for the line that differentiated
These from those of our ghosts:
The light from your window,
Serendipitous and apropos.

Together we hold it in
As we try to hold onto each other
With small gestures that index our conflicts and plans
Of making it back to where it all began.