Would that our lives not be separate,
with you in your rooms; I in mine.
We meet once a month, if we’re lucky,
not to be together, or to dine.
Where do you go there without me
the corridors along which you stalk?
What I’d give just hear, or to see
all these places abroad when we talk.
What is it you fight in the shadows?
what lives contend against yours in the way
among hallways as endless as cornrows
these paths that are long as the day?
You didn’t break my heart.
My heart was already broken.
It was enlarged, infected from words,
I knew I should have spoken.
I used to have a notebook
but now when I write,
it’s scattered across paper
just before I sleep at night.
On pages looseleaf and spendrift,1
held together by my memory
and thus dashed by the world.
Though I know that if I quit it,
everything: my job, my town, my family,
girls, my friends, my food;
if a day spread out before me,
I would find some reason to shove
this to another part of the brain.
These things I think about, like how
I turned you down and turned you away.
I rebuked the love you draped me in,
touched my shoulder, so unrelenting,
when you forgave me again.
You thought you might be one of many.
I assure you that you were not.
There’s not much to say
so I’ll make good use of saying it.
I’m getting old a few times over.
I’ve thrown words cheaply after nothing
wastefully disowned time without care
abandoned chances as casually as
dandelion seeds blown across summer air.
But when I see love done well,
I still ache for it myself.
Lovewe are locked away from one another.
only let our love break through between us.
As long as I have yet some life left in me
now I know what I desire:
To be your teacher and your master,
your acolyte and your slave.
The love I want breaks through
unto the clouds spattered near the sun
over fields and meadows or grassy safety.
You are the drink that I imbibe, my sky,
vast, wild and high, my sunset and sunshine
my eyes, my heart, my death and rise.
I can’t stop thinking that I’ve lived too long,
that I’ve seen all I deserve to see, and it’s wrong
to grasp to life, the black, the bad, the strife,
the heat of the day grips me and sears my skin.
Oh, what a wonder, oh what a waste.1
Dead at 27, missed the rest of my life
but what was I going to do with it anyway?
I didn’t lose my focus
because I never had it.
Recline and lie back,
put your feet up,
fold your arms in your lap
get your phone and see
all the things you think and dream,
and everyone you want to be.
I ought to write you something
for something’s what you deserve.
I’ve given you so much nothing
and it’s not that hard
to cast it with some letters.
Oh, it’s no work to think, or write
the things you make me feel at night
when I’m alone to brood and chide
myself and all the wasted time.
We’ve been apart at my design
the work I ply along a line
so long alone in darkness’s hold
to cry and rhyme a chime sublime
spending more time in darkness
has made me old.
When I feel it coming on,
in those times, like now,
when I am fated to be drawn
into the past and all my enemies there,
all my many enemies.
The weight of guilt, the sick of shame
the games I played, or those which claimed
me, but never without myself to blame.
And even now, I, selfishly,
fill looseleaf pages.
I do not call those I have wronged
nor atone myself through charity.
I take breaks from shame
to pretend that I was him wronged.
I pour my pain all along the page
and play my own victim.
Although no warlord, nor dictator,
I’m one of the silent people
who at every turn of life
choses to benefit himself
and chase pleasure amid strife.
If there were a God
or order to the riot of life
I’d never have been born,
nor ever live to waste the possibility
of concern for others, and not of me.
I try to analyze the facts
and understand in my self reflection
which feelings square with reality
and which ones are fantasies of me
upon my little crucifix,
sick and vain and useless.
When I dried your tear
you are an angel my dear,
my dear, dear,
I always wanted a write the songs
that were complex and beautiful
where kids could ride around in
Corollas and Accords with the cassette adapter
or the auxiliary cord
plugged in, gainst dusty windshields
the girl is driving, and the boy is me
desperately hoping he’s cool, or to seem
But I’m just another number
I’m just another voice,
just another singer
that some kid will say he’s going to be better than.
Dressed in a suit, gray and pretty, legs thin,
I went to your house in the night
and you thought I might be breaking in.
I want to tell you my story,
I don’t know why you would
want or need to hear it,
I understand that you’re at an age
where you feel the need
to be in a relationship headed
toward a future, headed for marriage.
When I love you is in the mornings
unravelling from the night’s stories
when the daylight struck a match
into the private worlds
we were keeping.
Listening, we turned over
with the windows open,
hearing, secondhand,
birds, once soaring,
reduced to roaring.
And in the fires of the day,
when light increased
the beauty of your face,
looking upon you,
I had storms of passion,
yet you were quietly breathing;
there, still, you lay.
It’s changes in the temperature,
slips of the wind, that move my heart.
To see you again, and later
I’ll strike the divide of us apart
to match you with my location
But now, in the exempt times
of morning, coerced inside,
I have to offer only warmth
and feeling, arms wrapped
around your form.
There are times when I think of my failures
in love, though I try not to.
For it did not go as planned.
Doubt civilized my hand
and counselled it
to remain aloof from all that.
My body remains where I left it.
Out of shape and unused.
Confused, torn and mottled,
chewed up, blackheads, soft chin,
brown eyes, good hips and bad skin.
I fix one thing and another breaks
my confession, abuse, reduced and mistakes.
I counted the number of times you breathed last night,
how many breaths caught and released with a sigh
but then I forgot;
I lost myself watching
the in and out of your breast
as the night eased your rest.
and the rhythm rocked us both soft
into the welcome of the stars aloft.
Those I did not try to count.
Write this lyric down, this melody, that line.
I risk losing ideas later, when I don’t oblige.
It threatens leaving me if I fail recording.
But sometimes so much comes all at once
that it runs over the rim
and I cannot keep
any of it in.
I don’t think we should, anymore.
Although you said that before me.
You said I would never be able to love
you, or to really love anybody.
You said I didn’t care about you
or what happened
when we were together
before it ended.
Please, please don’t text me again.
I never want to see you;
I just want this to end.
Around the spring I am reminded
that you introduced me to a feeling.
It’s neither your intention nor desire
that you should set my soul on fire
but I hope you will for a while.
I wish there were more drama in me
not for youI wish you free
but rather drama of the most pathetic kind,
entranced by fires my [illegible] light.
I am not growing older, only weaker
my mind is getting younger
becoming more a creature.
More selfish am I in my wants.
I thought I’d died and gone across.
But I’ve thought that countless times.
I think of all the chances that were mine
to take you in hand and
lead you into the light
to show you the love
I of you reciprocated,
the love you had made mine.
Somewhere, there must be you.
I am somewhere, so you must be there too.
Fear is thinking this is the peculiar work of dreams.
of a mind cycling through impossibilities
never to be real, while he sleeps.
Are you some figment or a fragment?
Some lesson or some flash?
A mistake or a phenomenon?
a mirage, or are you a trap?
Does everyone of us have a you?
How much sadness must be,
your absence resultant, in their touch.
I hope ’til hope is empty.
But hope has never brought me much.
When it is dried out,
I wonder where I find the well
that remembers my love for you
lest it might fail.
I think it may be
best found in the morning
when I’m awake, yet you’re asleep.
I think I see something at those times,
somewhere among the starts and sighs,
the remains of the starlit nights,
somewhere behind your lidded eyes
that reminds me. I, reminded,
commence my search
for the rope that binds,
that gathers from that well1
the water, which is love,
so I can bring it back to you
and you can just shrug.
Driving through Ohio during sunset,
the pastures appear as if,
under canopies of trees,
closing in pockets,
golden light is
protecting peace, and ease.
There is an older, two-lane highway
that skirts along the turnpike.
You go under, and over.
Trucks, stalling, then forward,
transpire the horizon
of the overpass.
The overpass is passed.
They pass over the world.
How very sad, and very alone, one feels,
when staring into the black void awaiting us.
It is nothingness and it is different,
glimpsing it once or twice
through the years, handled
as it sometimes is,
it mangled me that day.
Facing oblivion takes
a few days’ denial
to right one's spirit
and begin again
the delusion of life.
Some speak of the luck in which we all share
at being here, happening now.
But I see no luck,
none of its implied beneficence.
In our breaths and heartbeats
I see nothing at once which is
different from luck in
all of these atoms dancing amid one another
we who made a story of the random.
There is no why, no how and no future.
There is no being.
We are beyond language,
alive for no other reason
than that for the time being,
the phenomenon of genetics
has chanced us with
a bundle of cells that
keep us breathing for another day.
We aren’t already dead.
We are alive
and here, and then
we just aren’t again.