I needed you to fix this. Isn't this what people live for; the synchrony of breaths, my head on your bare chest, while you sleep and rest your hand in the curve of my back? Even in your sleep your hands memorize the shape of my body, the feel of my soft skin that you keep pressed tightly against you. You are not what I need.

In the silence of these moments, in the peace that surrounds two bodies wound together, my thoughts turn violent. I imagine the day you hear that I'm gone, your mind will come back here. The last time you felt my breath.

"how did she do it?"

you'll try to make sense of it, but you don't know me. No one does.

These moments make me so deeply lonely. You were supposed to fix that. Instead I wake you from your dream,

"you need to go"

Love Story (Lame)

This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn't take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would've come over to torture him deliberately
and now the torture was an unfortunate side effect
of my sadness, and had nothing to do with him at all.
Sleeping with you would be like
a drowning woman grabbing an anvil,
I explained. A burning man guzzling gasoline.
Lame analogies, but I was trying to make a point.
When he got up for a drink, I missed him
but that feeling disappeared once he came back.
I sat there and tried to feel sad,
tracking my blue mute form
as it sank to the ocean floor.

Yours Alone

This thing-

you'd think it would show up when you're driving some windy brook road,

the road where the stars open up like a chasm ready to swallow you

and you're so small. This is so small.

But that would mean it was a feeling, or a sense memory,

something to be experienced and then forgotten. But it's not, it is real,

it has become real. It has teeth, and they chatter with the anxiety that death leads to nothing.

It has moved in with you and it weeps all day. Strangely, it is attractive to you in ways you never knew you could find a thing attractive; it's thin, pale, naked, sexless. Is this what you want now? What could this possibly mean? That you are ready to accept that love is boundless, faceless-even forgiving- or that you were just going along your lonely way and this is what happened?

You can ponder it all you want, but this is yours now. It's yours alone.

Pumpkin Festival

Every year in Keene, NH they threaten to

discontinue the annual pumpkin festival.

But somehow, every year, it keeps coming back for me.

I'm glad. Sure, it clogs the street. Sure, people from all over come to look

at big, orange, oddly shaped veggies.

But it's beautiful. All those people, and all those pumpkins,

well, they are just beautiful.

Fuck the War

Fuck the war

Fuck oil

and politics

and national borders

and fear.

Fuck the weapons used to fight the war

Fuck the hands that pull the triggers,

the minds that conceive of war,

the hearts broken, the lives shattered

the buildings lost

the crumbling ground

beneith the war.

Fuck the war.

The Real Reason

I imagine him staring out the foggy glass airplane window. I assume he got window seat, he only takes the best (I think this as I consider the ease with which he let me go). He did not come here to work, or to love me..no, those were the words attached to the actions, but they are not the truth. I imagine him reciting Blake to the soft, dim reflection of his weathered face, tired from the emotion of it all. "If the sun and the moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out." i murdered myself eight months later. and in the pane of glass on the airplane window he will always remember what i looked like the first time he saw me. and i wish that he could have said that it was at a bar in Iowa, playing a silky piano. i wish he could say that he immediately recognized what sustained me, not music, or poetry, or my appetite for suffering, but there, under all my drifting world of pain, he could maybe see my desire to see how much longer the black bitter tide could sustain me, how much longer i could live on nothing.

Faces

I love people and their beautiful faces. Here are a few I'm particularly fond of:

This is Jesse. We've been through hell and back. He's my wailing wall.

The last one standing.

Jesse and my heart.

My nephew at the beach. Booth Bay, ME.

Laura. She laughs and cries. I catch her doing both.

Howard and I at the Agricultural Festival in Brattleboro, VT.

He is one of my dearest friends.

Stranger with a great face. Brattleboro, VT

And so it fails again.In Monet's Water Lilies, willows dissolve into flowers dissolve into water, and form becomes a dream in purples and blues
without scent or story. And you know what you're supposed to see. And you know what all that color is meant to be. But maybe someone should have pointed out that the whole picture is very unclear. That life, like water lilies dissolves into flower, into water, in deep blue and black and disappears. Without scent or story.

Where The Light Gets In

Happiness after grief feels like such a betrayal: the hurt not denied.. not pushed away, but gone entirely for that moment you can't help feeling good in, a moment of sudden, irrational joy over nothing of consequence, really, which makes it all somehow seem even worse...
Shouldn't happiness be the result of some grand event, something adequate to counter
that aching, gaping chasm that opened when ?. . . But, no: it's merely this: there goes my little neice, running barefoot, no pants, mouth stained in pink drenched lollipop.











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This Morning

I should have tossed the roses he sent
washed the vase of the stench
soaped and scrubbed it clean-
that kind of end to it.
Not this chitchat in bed-
the blinds left open,
the sun coming through.
Light cuts holes in the dark
revealing his skin,
the rise and fall of his chest.
Light stretches across a room
"You seem fragile," he says
and I cannot bear the glimpse of his beard
or his new, expensive shoes.