I need you.
In the reassurance
of all the secrets I couldn’t tell
and in the ones I did.
I need you in the Saturday morning cartoons.
I need a shoulder brush
a hand to hold
a smile and a wave.
I need you to be okay
with the tears and the fears
and the gossip spilled over sandwhiches
or the compliments spread across a makeup counter.
I need you
in the passenger seat of my car
in the booth across from me
and in the notifications bar
waiting with a joke.
She sees the shape before the surface,
not the horse, but the absence
it leaves in the field.
Not the hand,
but the imprint it refused to make.
The warmth of unspoken citation.
She sees across the grain:
a boy writing himself into a stanza
not meant for him.
A mirror scoured by other faces.
A window with no outside.
Glosses on a kiss that never lands.
This is what’s left:
a pronoun borrowed too long.
A touch indexed.
An ache that footnotes the body
but won’t name its source.
She sees all the way through.
That’s the punishment.
In the therapy office this week
Someone asked me
“What do I do about all of this?”
Gesticulating to the world as a whole
There isn’t a word accessible to us
That fully encompasses it
She cries and I realize I haven’t replaced the tissues
Reminder:
Invest in stock in tissues
Because this collective trauma
Is a train gaining speed
Reminder:
Google if investing in tissues as a therapist
Is somehow a conflict of interest
Does that make me invested in keeping my clients
Crying?
I finally respond in my favorite way
When I have no fucking clue
“What do you think you should do?”
She falters
We falter together
Therapy is sometimes an eloquent dance
But most of the time
It feels like stumbling through ice skating
For the first time
We spend more time grounded
Than we do flying
brood XIV
the unbearable hord
of harsh noisemakers
invading my auditory canal
cannot stop their racket
cannot break the cycle
of their seventeen year bacchanal
brood XIV
I dont want to know much about you
your molted exoskeleton
your red eyes orange wings
your annoying invasion
of my sweet sweet mulberry tree
brood XIV
yet somehow
I treasure your reliable return
for when the forecast that the world
will continue to turn
depends on nymphs going underground
i can dig the fact
of the odds being
that when you return
I’ll be the one under the ground
A whisper grows to a scream
not from the shadows of my throat,
but from the pit of my consciousness.
A question, unsettling and terrifying:
“Why do evil things haunt the good?”
Natural to demand merit.
Ignorant to expect justice.
Though I wonder:
Is the good revealed by what we weigh?
Beneath hopeful deeds
lie shattering motives.
Kindness with stipulations.
Love with terms and conditions.
Forgiveness, misused and misrepresented.
I ache for recognition.
I desire karma carved in stone.
Though the heavens
drown me out.
Truth’s quiet hand lowers me,
revealing an epiphany.
One Man
Truly good
handed over.
Not to fate,
only to purpose.
Filthy thorns.
Deadly nails.
Ghastly wounds.
Willingly worn.
The screams now
shrink in silence.
The question shifts.
“Why does mercy rain on the wicked?”
Good intentions,
undone and dismissed.
Hard work,
laughed into silence.
Empathy,
hardened into apathy.
I am buried under the
prison of my own disillusion.
The realization stings,
though not for long.
I am among the fallen.
Filled with malevolence.
Unworthy. Undeserving.
Simply not good.
Still, saved by grace.
Though the weight of my shame
Has chained me to the floor of deceit.
What if I can’t accept this gift?
That is the question that
terrifies me the most.
Mark this?
No; what are you talking about?
I never forget what I was looking for
just ’cause I crossed a threshold to find it.
I say what it is
over and over again inside
my mind
till it’s done.
To become like me,
vivid, unruled,
hold the match close enough to catch the edge of a sharpened word.
If/when flames falter,
breathe out to keep it lit.
Can you remember, now,
what else happened
In the dark of that terrible night?
Astrobright to your filler.
Dance: that is all.
… By the way, i remember when you told me that you never burned those particular witches.
… By the way, i never mastered the trombone.
…I’ll never understand why the trees plant themselves along the fencelines.
I don’t cuss and fight
Anymore.
My aim and approach are one in the same.
Breathe a word.
I’ll sheath the blade.
You know that I can do it.
That old girltalk mashup, what was it called?
That’s right;
Smash Your Head.
That old girltalk mashup, what was it?
That’s right;
Smash Your Head.
Cut off fingers can not reach
For a dream better luck to forget
A pillowcase black hole overhead
Repeating who will tell them about
Left over sweat between two bodies
Angel’s with beaks, needled wings
Carved into the arms of homemade
Tar to veins and ambulances
Disguised as tunneled realms of light
Silence before the nod
Silence before breath
You don’t have to wait long
But in the bare breasted morning
birds are chirping over gutters
And the grass doesn’t yet smell
Of vomit and you smile right
Before paradise and Hell
