sticks and stones

lost between the sheets of
all the ways you couldn't love me
anymore
the dollar bills and mountains from molehills
the distant friends come back again
the nights around a campfire
the stars we shared a few of
its been another week of me
trying to let go
as life parades around me glory
hanging from my neck
new friends i'm making
and i cleaned my room
get up early to exercise
throw a blanket over the telephone
now that i'm dead to you
am i really dead to you?
someone said i never lived
in your upside down hemisphere
to you
i'm just an apparition of swirling words
and eyes too deep to be real
so what do you have now
a sea full of beautiful fish
and a broken bird in your
oversize hands?
listen at night
when the wind stops
when the rain stops
when everything sleeps around you
and that velvet pain falls against your chest
hardplush echoes
of an emptiness
your heart can't contain
dont cry
dont bleed
dont make a sound
just remember
so i don't have to
forget...

i never realized
that i stored all
my unwritten poems
inside that heartshapedbox
until you left with it
and i couldn't
speak

blackdye inkbath
to disguise your
wherabouts
everylivingthing
has its escape route
planned
right into its
dna

so then you've disappeared
but i could always feel
your twisting tides
this oceangirl
never feared the breaking
waves the crashing sound
i was born on a beach
and baptized in saltwater
i dreamed your island
between my childfingers
the way some girls might
play with a golden ball
a little too close
to the well

do you think of sand
as time
slipping through cracks
in holy hands?
i think of a cradle of crumbling
stone
that i sink down into
as you press me into
the shape of a star
i think of moonpull
and the times
you don't want to be
touched

fingers sliding into
a customclinging velvetglove
rockingsailboatsundayafternoonlove
myths and memories tempting gravity
from above

i borrowed a book
and bought two more
stole the last
and devoured all four
traded my body for words
like a dictionarywhore
i still breathe poetry
in and out
but i never write anymore...

body pictures

the shape of your thigh
in my hand
makes an interesting conversation piece,
the composition
of your lips
against my palm
the texture
of heat blending into
tangled sheets
is pure
genius,
the perspective from under,
the eyes smeared
closed,
angle, curve
fingers tracing
back of neck,
the jealous film
grabbing the skin
pressing flesh
flat in a four-sided frame
no sign of movement

we still life

we breathe

hair drips onto
thirsty shoulders,
hips slide eloquently
through empty air,
turn, pose
shifting sounds left behind,
the cheekbone flush,
the captured canvas
painted perfectly,
we shrink and slip
inside the lens
a mirror, a microscope
an x-ray
to show how fast
your blood pumps,
the way the spine trembles
from a tornado
of touch,
the depth of drunken desire

shadow and light
play across your face
the reoccurring dream
of your hands
pulling it all into place
before the rising
of a blind new day
brilliant sunspeak
pouring through clouds
through windows
leaving these pictures of our human puzzle
overexposed
forgotten souvenirs
of how a whisper
looks laying between
two photogenic hearts
as they echo
their conjoined sorrow
through cages of white
 

another night with no a/c
but i leave the window closed
your birds sleep just outside
and i don't want to hear them tonight
mocking my midnight misery
i pull up words like weeds
drown my eyes in empty sheets
and watch these minutes collect
along the edges of my bed
like dust
like ashes
i stare at your face like the sun
knowing i'll go blind
if i look to long
i finger the fabric of unraveled
promises and freefall into forgetting
it starts with an inventory
of everything you mean to me
how many days are left in the year
how many pennies i threw into
the fountain in front of my building
while whispering your name
it makes no sense
and my chest is heavy with solitude
with the magnitude
of your apathy
and the unveiling of a side of you
i never thought i'd see
the side that was always too afraid
to fall in love with me
i consider sleeping
but i know
a dream of your smile
would bury me in the loss
of a thousand imagined moments
outside an empty house
on a lonely hill.

you needed a new set of walls
that hadn't met your fists
but you still came back with gifts
bracelets of bruises to slip around my wrists
and lips that sink more than ships
i love you still you whisper to the
shakingskin i used to live in
i still care about you
enough to mold you into the girl
i'm used to
and i am driving off the road
into the lake
trapped by the pressure
the icecold
the color blue
and all i can grasp
is childwords
from the backseat
like a premonition
i couldn't hear
two closed hands in front of her
and the question
"what do you fear?"

yeh look at me
waiting by the phone
so patiently
so matter-of-factly
saving time by not taking
breaking waking saving something
red flowers on my dresser
i bought them
for me
i have this angelskin
that doesn't ever
sleep
pretend me circled round
a dying tree
chameleon cannibal
i turn the color green
invisible grieving and bloody
knuckles from the concrete
i've been beating
i'm hungry thirsty starving for something
but i just don't feel like eating
and i make myself sick if i look
in the mirror
a brokendoll porcelainplush
delicate
and needy
two days i slept in the alley counted bricks
two days you savored the sun wore a black hat
and performed all your best magictricks
snakecharmer stuntman flash your fingers
oh so charismatically
i guess you've been very busy lately
oldfriends, new jobs, and injured knees
it must be hard to remember
how to talk to a girl made of bees.