if you went to a concert would you go to the front row?

I think you're really pretty,
But I focus on the raggae band instead

life's a funny place

maybe my self-care routine is me thinking
this is a game I can hack
maybe my lack of a self-care routine is me thinking
this is a game I can hack

i wanted

to chase after your rules

like afternoon thunderstorms

It's Hard to Understand a Person

when that person is you

It felt like

losing you happened 

behind my back.

galore

today i avoided you like porch light

to my headful of swerving bugs.

today i avoided me like a rest-stop bathroom that

hasn’t been cleaned by Tammy in two weeks

(fudged the numbers there).

Sometimes

I feel like someone is holding their hand
just above my skin but
they hold back.

Now This

Last night I fell asleep thinking pride was like a wild horse

I had to break. This morning the sun sits golden on the horizon,

Like the times I walked through the acrid, sick sweet smell 

Of burning trash, streets waking like your gut turning over and 

Starting in the morning. 

I remember the thick thudding of housemat being cleaned, the muffled 

Cough-hack-spit of a morning routine, birds freewheeling

Amongst the ramshackle wiring that reminded me of childhood doodles

And how I feel when I look at women. 

Now, my limbs ambling and loose, joints unfolding

Like math or a waterfall. 

Now, my thoughts hushed like loam. 

Body, standing in the middle of an empty highway.

No cars, no people.  

I remember, it is Easter.

Wedding Season: B-sides

Transition

My body’s frame, ripe with jostling bone and liquid along the

Path next to the river.  Heartbeats lace my breath.  The ground

Feels hard.  

I see a family of ducks mildly drifting, nestled firmly into the water’s

Orange, chamomile surface.

It is sunrise.  

I too, feel magnetic pulls, urges to migrate, and

Bump constantly against the rib cage

Of my flock.  Duly, my insides smart

Like a finger, licked and raised to the crisp wind.  

A few brown paper leaves are falling.  When I watch them fall

It’s as if the doors in my eyes

Shed their handles as well.  

I wonder now--what you will grasp onto when you

Want to come in?

And I wonder how south has become

Less a direction where migrant feelings flee to

Than an artery,

An uncontrollable pouring of what I thought myself to be

Toward an ocean of loneliness

Just outside of focus.  

A loneliness that means a few things:

The silk boniness of cars passing in the street,

The swollen machinery of the way we are

Grandfathered into this world,

And the memory that friends walk together in the rain not because

They enjoy getting wet but because

They don’t really notice it’s raining.  

Farther down the path, the image of the ducks still strokes

At my salt block heart, coarse and caring,

A mother cow's tongue against my most fragile self.   

Naming this season once felt so simple.  

Now, I speak only in flakes of

Paint, chipping from the words

In the sold-out church of my mind.