untold

Have you or have I
rewritten the story?
I recall like yesterday
How I recoiled
How he called you out
How you insisted, then persisted and convinced, yourself
How I went along,
against all my instincts
because I wanted to destroy something that night
Because the one that should have stepped in, hadn’t
Because I should have asked him to
Because he shouldn’t have had to Because I shouldn’t have had to ask
Mostly, because all that came since was born of your love and my spite
Oh, what a story it would make

away

I, who sat, writing
rivers to float past your shore,
am lost at open sea
You, head inland from torrents
I unleashed upon your dreams

shifting

Did you think I would flip
on a dime-store line
after 25 years worth of time
And that in you I’d find
something unexplored
through your imploring eyes?
I’ve seen the tides come in
and sweep my castles aside
and took it in stride astride
the latest crushed hope
the door to freedom would open
my clam shell heart
Like the heat of friction
could fix my mixed-tongue diction
and shape a fiction
in my mind so as to find
solace in you
Let us savour
this year’s flavours
as I fall out of favour
with the changing sky above us
and sand giving way
beneath our feet
hushing our decrees
while we shuffle dreams discreetly
I grow tired of beseeching
for the chance to appease
So I will give in
to my tether and
talk only of the weather
and the unavailing
view from here

proxy

And every once in a while I’d check in on her

To see if anything had changed enough to make a show of it
Or just a change that showed

I’d wonder if she’d tired of your flowers, kisses, apologies and latest gestures of atonement

I’d wonder what she chose to wear that last time she’d decided
to give you another chance

And what new shame she’d since come to know

How many disappointments had she swallowed or what your worst looked like on her face

And when she disappeared without warning,

I wondered if she chose to leave
Or was finally effaced

newborn prayer

soil is most fertile when
seeped in sacrifice
and tilled with guilt

and what has all this
to do with you
newest girl?
what do you care
that daddy’s lust was for another
if it made your mama ripe
while she lay in wait

what does it matter
if neither was ready nor willing
or that winter is long
you’ll radiate enough warmth
to get them through

who cares what goes on
under frozen ground
as long as the tendrils
with which they yoke each other
find that soil
that won’t wash away
when the spring rains come

Originally published on jotnrot, 01/12/2014

in the blink of an eye

You are beautiful today
You are skin
full of blood surfacing
hot to the touch
You are bones
erected in sure measure
steady and ready
to bare my weight
You are muscles
extending to contract
the space between us
And all of you is palpable
reachable and graspable
Unlike your sparse sharp words
and slick resolve
deflating expectations
to swipe them silently away
in the blink of an eye

late confessions

confessions pour and river
when there is no after
gathering solemnly
to pay last respects
we flail in insight’s waters
rising to see nothing
could have been altered
that this wall was where
we would falter
with no way
to divert the flow
of past regrets
flooding into swirls
of longed-for words
hardly heard
in the din
of dizzying eddies
swelling
to this end

what will you say

will you know what to say
when I look on astonished
by what the years
have taken away or
dragged into the waning light
of this blue winter night

will you know what to say
when I forgive all
I know you cannot give
without all that you knew
giving way

will you know what to say
when we’re done
with the pretense
that brought us here
against all sense
when I touch you in a way
that belies
all I tried to hide
with gestures
to dazzle and blind you
when a hint of your touch
will be enough
to swipe away
such confessions
admitting all
but the mention
that here we are again
singing of beginnings
when we both know
it can only be the end

just once

you said what we say
when something’s too good
or simply too hard to resist-
life is too short
not to bend this one time
and enjoy what it has to give

I wanted to say
but bit my tongue
what I also knew to be true
that life after this
would be too long and wasted
spent wanting far more of you

learning from grammar

I should know by now
how to follow my nouns
with verbs to the object
without inverting them
to a question
perverting my intention
until will is twisted
and tethered to some
inevitable regret