by what you say
                        do
                            n’t do
                                   say
    who you are
                           n’t
    how         say what you say
I don’t need to say anymore.

I peeled my image from the endless cameras, burned off the nerves 
in my heart to feel nothing when I looked at my corroding reflection.
I became a ghost in every friend’s picture frame, my body dissolving
into blue noon fog, diffusing myself into the white expansive sunlight.
I begged for erasure. I wanted to be beautiful. I stared at myself
until my face swallowed my soul and spit it back out like the pit
of a sour fruit. I craved to strip to the bone, then melt down the bone,
be left as only a collection of the beautiful things I’d create: paintings
and poetry. I thought my life would be so beautiful in my own absence.
I dug at the mirror until I fell completely through. I found myself in echoes.
I did not exist for four years. I became beautiful out of spite, out of
self-hatred. I wish someone had taught me how to do it better.

I stare at my reflection in the rear view. I am startled by being human.
I turn my face and watch how the light catches in the blue glass of my eyes.
I compile the art that I’ve made, thumb through the pages, witness
the versions of me unfurling like moonflowers in the darkness between.
I am older, I can see the years passed stripping off like layers of wallpaper,
and I was always the same damn thing. The stone around me has broken down,
like a marble statue chiseled from a prism, I have eroded myself into something
lovely enough. My under-eyes purple, my scars smooth and I do not disturb them.
My hands have shaped many things. I touch my skin, wear it like my own,
not a burden or bag of bones to drag. I expand to fill the voids I once hid within.
I collect photographs of myself, marvel how my head doesn’t burn itself to ash 
when I see my own appearance. One day I began to appear. I began to live.

Words powerful enough
to define whole worlds
and entire beings.
Utter satisfaction
or devastation
they leave in their wake.
The ending of a story,
true or fictional,
leaving impressions
intentional or not.
The End of a symphony.
The End of a book.
The End of a show.
The End of an era.
The End of a world.
The End of a life.
The End…
What are you left with?

June 9th, 1956 
in Beatttyville, Kentucky 
at a tiny Christan Church 
near the railroad tracks,
Blanche Mae Webb married
Norman Douglas Waterbury.
For sixty five years
they were never apart. 
Today would have been 
sixty eight years, but
she died in 2021.
He still remembers 
spending the night in
Paintsville,Kentucky on
their wedding night as
they headed back to
Averill Park, New York 
where they would begin 
their life together. 

6/9/2024
KW

She tastes like wine
in my mind, though we 
never got that close.
Even when she held me, 
it was at a distance. But 
when I sip 
either white or red,
sweet or bitterly dry,
I think of the way
her eyes sparkle 
when she laughs.
So, I hold her image
in my mind and drink
in remembrance 
of her. And I avoid
the bread, so the rush 
of blood goes
to my head, and I float
away, adding another thorn
to the crown. 

Timorous flowers bloom only at night to drown our morning ego.

#AmericanSentence

$8 for entry, $30 for 22 tickets,
but we should’ve bought armbands, they’re $35 for unlimited rides. 
I was suckered out of it, I guess,
though suckered by no one but myself. 

my gaze quivers from ride to ride, 
all towering against the smoky stratus.
I’m suckering myself out of them,
but I’ll entertain a few.

the first is the rollercoaster,
a shivering little steel thing.
the second (and last) is the swing;
metal porchswings,
spinning through space on their tether,
narrowly dodging a basswood tree every time.
I extend my feet down in an attempt to brush them against the leaves.
by the time the second ride’s done,
I’m out of the 22 tickets I was sharing with a friend.

I get bored watching the others ride rides
I probably wouldn’t want to ride anyways,
so I decide I want to win a goldfish,
but I don’t- I win two.

they’re sitting in a bowl on my dresser now,
but I only treated enough water for them to fill it halfway.
they’re swimming near the top,
mouths gaping at the line where
bowl half-full becomes bowl half-empty,
and I think they’re getting bored with it. 

What will flourish the soul
is a splash of delight
like a luminous peacock
radiant blossoms
bright dancing butterflies
or loving memories of you.

You were not the first kiss
but you were that first kiss

Not the first to touch me
But the first for that touch

Not the first person I danced with
But the first to dance that way

Not the first to break my heart
And not the last to break it that way.