For days I lived in locked rooms without clocks,
for months I’ve been treading this endlessness.

Someone told me I sleep with eyes slivered open.
Someone else told me my hands were a corpse’s.

Cope. I drown in magnesium, knock myself out
cold dead on the bedroom floor. Good riddance.

Everyone is mad I now live lawlessly, apathetic.
We both get to change the rules on each other.

Why would I pay for an education or get a real job
when I could talk to old men with death fetishes?

Let me walk around this house when it’s silent,
empty. I need to think. I have a lifetime to unbury.

I have a skeleton to marvel at. Sorry, your watercolor
butterfly inspirational quote murals make me gag.

        Sometimes

        Sometimes,
        I find what I seek,
        a snail darter,
        the endangered
        minnow
        some called ugly,
        with stripes across
        its back
        and down like
        a poem moves.

bushy overgrowth, verdant images
of my father’s recollection of the four of them,
shirtless, hot,
hungry,
hunkered in the field, on a mission
to not get caught.
the stealing only lasts a second
in his retelling,
and then absconsion to the creekside, 
sharp rock, split in two,
a watermelon so red, and ripe,
warm from the summer sun.
shared, ejecting black seeds
covered in spit onto the bladed carpet,
waiting to take root

tell me, though,
towards what sun did those vines grow?

Birth Day
The day you arrived here
No longer there

Birthday
Another year here
Not there

                            for Kate

My niece wavers near the top of the rope
pyramid, an easy fifteen feet from the ground.
The final push to the top seems insurmountable.
“Do it!” I say. “If you make it all the way up,
you’ll be champion of the playground!”
A timid heel on a rope, a final pull, and she
turns around, miles above the earth, all
smiles. I take her picture. “Now touch the top!”
She smacks the top of the pole. “How do I
get down?” She asks. “Who cares?” I say.
We laugh.
                     Before my niece winds a path back
to the planet, a younger girl informs me that
“nobody can be champion of the playground.”
I leave it to life and poetry to sort it out for this
six-year-old stick-in-the-mud because clearly
there is a current champion, and it’s my niece.

Discipline is not getting up ten minutes
before class begins and praying you’ll
make it on time for once while you sprint
across campus. Discipline is getting up
four hours before class begins and cooking
breakfast before going to the gym and
working out and still managing to make it
to class ten minutes before it starts. It’s
waking up when your mind is screaming
at you to sleep in. It’s cooking a healthy
breakfast when it would be so much easier
to skip. It’s planning your day before it
even begins. It’s getting up in the morning
and setting crazy goals that you’ll reach
before noon. It’s pure discipline every day.

OH Man! It is HOT
Could fry eggs on the sidewalk
Breakfast is now Served!

It’s the physics of the blade,
the way the sunlight glistens 
from angled distances.

The grass is greener on the other side,
and some meadows require
space to be seen and loved properly.

the lion’s share