Tuesday, January 31, 2023

homesick for high school

he points to the divet, ive been driving in the yard, one tire, over and over, carving up one little spot. i should feel bad and want to stop but it looks so much like you. it feels like you. it feels like home. I want to keep on and then lay in the muddy, bare track and soak you up. in highschool you always parked half in the yard. your mother screeching, drunk from the living room window for you to not. but you always do. parking so you edge out of the winding street into the yard. two passenger tires of your oldsmobile, red and dripping with your personality. various signals of interests and loves hanging from the mirror, stickers covering the back, the seat covers, the smell, the case full of self-made cds. how many hours did we spend here? in our little haven? driving up to the river with your boyfriend in the backseat, us in front conversing as if he didn't exist. in those moments, he didn't. or you recording me telling a story on your new video camera -a wedding gift you received- to remember me by. as if we could forget. as if our souls weren't sewn together and our hearts hadnt grown around each other's like a tree that's merged into the chain link fence like you didn't impact everything you touched forever. you mark the world, all of it, with you. from me to the oldsmobile i know is rotting in a junk yard to the yard which still bore the scar off your tires years after you died. oh he points to a divet in the yard from me driving in the yard. from your spirit taking my wheel and i want to shrug. what's a six inch wide, two foot long stretch of yard to the rememberance? the healing tears of my eyes which can see your perfect straight teeth, and feel the loose thick strands of your hair long, or the scar tissue built up that ran from the base of your big toe to your ankle of your left foot from wearing the wrong kind of shoes, and the stocky blunt fingers grasping the wheel, pointing to a new cd, laughing with me one last time?

Sunday, January 22, 2023

young turks

Remember the night 
we stumbled as little kids
across campus
hand in hand
across a little brook,
seated in the leaves. 
The sky opened
and we were secreted 
and one, as if the clouds
bespoke us into being.
Cut, trimmed, and tailored
to fit perfect in this moment.
Our names written 
under a window sill of 
the room where we met.
To capture like a polaroid,
Temporary but like permeance.
We knew we wouldn't return,
that this was a bookmark flimsy
string between pages.
You would go from small town
to big city and I from the urban 
blight to suburbs. 
We knew we would,
Just not how.


look at us now

We don't look back on the past
but slice that thin curtain 
between now and then,
let our past self embody today,
for if present can gaze back
Why not the other way?

reoccurring

Why am I like that pet store
from my dream
where I took you to play with puppies
because you asked for it
and they sold us a puppy which died
in your arms minutes later.
Dream you still thanked me,
hugged me.
The short lived hope crushed by 
external realities. 

this year

Looking for meaning in all of the places,
It's a rabbit year, I'm a rabbit;
It's a chariot year, my soul card;
It's the 14th year since your death.
Now my life before equals my life
without you, like bookends pushing
up encyclopedias of my heart,
heavy volumns bending the shelf,
bowed from the postmarked grief.
Like physics it fades but never goes away.

dreamt of liberty

Ignorance rises to the top
as bubbles in the boil, but love
flows down through the folds and
the ribbons of your skin,
tie a bow on the moment, 
a present to unwrap and
cling sunshine to your hair
sprouting out. I tug it. 
tug with my teeth,
fields of wheat.
patriotic, take a knee,
before my lady liberty.
I want to.
explore the caverns of you,
cave of wandering delight,
follow home the bright light of your eyes, and
laugh and giggle as only girls might.

Monday, January 16, 2023

infinity

Someday my whole personality 
My entire soul
Will be algorithm
Echo on a feedback loop