When you live in a place long enough, you learn its secret language
You know when the wind smells like rain
You know which season arrives with the throb of drums
You know the taste of Ale-8 with your ribeye sandwich
You know time marked by the shadow on the mountains
When you touch home on a map, you know what it feels like
duck muck cluck buck stuck —
coffee singing chewing gum.
duck muck cluck buck stuck!
You sit beside me
we laugh
we sigh
we whisper
we eat lunch and watch netflix
we curse
we roll our eyes
we snicker
we huff and puff
we grunt.
All in a day’s work.
To be anywhere
but here,
in this moment
at this time.
To experience
any sensation
except this heaviness
in my chest.
My feet have begun
to move
without permission
from my
mind.
No time for packing.
My eyes search for
any view except
this ugliness
that faces me.
I can’t stay
I can’t sit here
with this
with you.
My heart,
my soul
have already left.
My body is
all that remains.
Hallowed is the Harlequin,
Sitting is stable,
but I’m unable to sit
by waysides: it stings,
the trapped breath lining
my insides because my mind
races as I rest.
I’d rather run at
my bedside than stop, unwind
till I’m twine without
knots, gasping as I
say it all, gulping poison
as cure, blindsided
by why the pain won’t
subside. Stagnant beats strangled,
but sickness spins ‘still’’
into a question —
it’s the aside: “Please, heart, be
the source, not the sink.”
They look askance.
This poetry attention.
(Well, except April.)
There is no damn conceivable reason
That rationalizes the irrational
There is no damn retrievable season
That could take us back…
Muscle tensed.
Ready at any moment to run,
Run to you
Who takes solace knowing, to you I succumb
The one.
The one I mull through every minute detail of life,
The one I can’t wait to share my poems to,
leaving out the words that may hurt you…
Because, no doubt they are pointed indeed,
Leaving no mercy for you or for me
This is why I simply can’t, and don’t,
Though, conscious says the word is “won’t”
Your approval could take me to the moon
And
Your burning eyes may take me there soon
Intertwined in every cell of my being
It seems.
Haunted in daylight and the darkness of dreams,
By your unmatchable and intentional placement of hands,
Haunted now knowing the same hands found new places to land
However brief,
For whatever why,
She brought you relief,
Each time I see it, I wish you’d just lied
There is no damn conceivable reason,
Bullied and broken all parts of me now
There is no damn retrievable season
That could mend what I’ve allowed
