happy anniversary

Its been two years, from friend hand wrote vows cause printers can break, to songs we didn't know cause sometimes a friend can't show. We paid a stranger and it made do; we made friends with the mayor and he cried too. But that was before. Before now. Now that our relationship has visiting hours and an access code. Date night tube feeding under romantic fluorescent light, candles not allowed. I sleep in a chair and you in bed but our fingers still hook and touch, so its almost like the space isn't there. Two years, that's the cotton gift, right? Well, I brought none. They got you well stocked. With the white sheets, the sterile blankets, and the fleece restraints. I breathe you. Everything breathes you. It's you. Always you. Cotton just can't say any of that but I guess with the ventilator, you can't say anything either.

and you're not even happy you're not here

I'm wearing a dress
It is a little too tight
But it used to be yours
So constriction feels like a hug.
The surgery is scheduled five hours
The lunar eclipse this morning
It only took one.

I'm wearing his wedding band
And your dress
And I'm mad, I'm sad
I'm a million things it seems
Cause outside of my world
There are husbands and wives who get to fight
Carry on planning their lives

But I'm trapped
Here, where,
Everyone is sucked into a screen
Like none of us know what we are doing here.
Here I am, Tight dress, wedding band, hours on end
And you don't even know you're lucky you're not.

Ingrate

You're complaining about the height of the bed
The lack of control, mostly how your feet spring
When the nurse lets them go
Two months ago you couldn't breathe on your own
I walk past a man and he said
"I'm a fat man in a wheelchair."
Like I should care; I hated him.
And I want to hate you too
Meds are due at 3 and not a minute sooner
The trach collar makes your neck hot
But I don't hate you, I feel sorry
I swear I didn't know how perfect our lives were
Before they weren't.

it's called a cry for help but i guess this is a wrong number

The silence between us strains miles of ocean, two lone islands masked in psychosis...or some shit. Piercing glares, icicle snares, trapped in lapping waves, drowning. What once was my warm water home.Those clear, blue eyes have a way to see through me, to see through my walls, and see through this thing I thought we had built together. Further now, it's quiet, it's conversations not happening.My strained sandpaper smoke-filled throaty screams. It's your ears don't work, your back can't hold the grappling fear, muscles giving in, shoving two more boxes in the overfilled trash can, taut plastic...taut skin, stretched and hurting, ready to tear flimsy like that transparent baby skin, but it's my skin.Get tough! Thicken up! Calm down! And just shut the fuck up! But you move in one horse blinder plane, backwards. Sometimes no plane, no movement, just silence, giving in to giving up. It's this thing growing between us, we made it, and it's dying and gasping for breath. My blob, amoeba form stretching out tubercle arms toward your bobbing schismatic, your solid land, but you just turn your head. Away from me. You turn to watch a flying and cawing gull.

Likely Unlikely Moments

Now there's wadded up tissues
covered in what's left of the face I wore today
a thousand cigarette butts
and pantyhose with dirt and grass
holes with worn in soles,
cause there were shoes we couldn't fill
so we accepted our steps, and gave in
there's also, the cake we didn't eat
swimming in fears we rarely say
along with the massive space, pensive and grave
that I once thought was between me and you
well, now that's in the trash compacter too.

anchor

Give me your eyes till you neck breaks like a rope is itching around it

itchin' like this pantyhose thin and taunt on my thick girl thighs

cause my mouth can only say this once maybe twice before it's tired.

We are not condemned in bubbles of time and space as we spark

forward or backward, whichever we choose, to a better world to come

in a better world to come, hand in hand, little atoms in the bustle of life.

It's just all this living that gets in life's way and your billowing breath

blunt teeth and words, we will grasp and nurse every minute of it

under lit advertisements, with our feeble fetus hands and wobbly hearts.

sweltering summer

my anger burns cadillac red
tendions protruding bridges
escape maps, flesh highways
endless sliding wrists
steering us lost, floating
like aerial beats
till trees flash mosaic
stabbing sunshine
wet windows with
that hot summer rain
and my face with its tears.