The Pendulum is Bored

Run the music, run your mouth

Run a stick along the fence

Take your fair-weather down south

Toss the noise and make amends

No more time to do the swing

The pendulum is bored again

Back and forth, we break and fix

Nobody said we’re ten for ten

It’s not a balance that we need

‘Cause all of us are gonna die

But moral compasses could always

Magnetize these lungs to try

Asthma in, and asthma out

Full of sorrys, full of lead

Feeling guilt and feeling fury

The ocean stuck under my bed

Apologizing to my stomach

With my red eyes turning down

“I’m sorry that we can’t be perfect,

It’s just…our love isn’t a noun”

Heaving particles of actions

Verbs and dust filling the air

I’m trying so hard to forgive us

In time to love her as a pair

I’m trying so hard to forgive us

Before these lungs start to despair

Requesting Reassurance

-a villanelle

Tell me beautiful things that I already know

Natural to forget the words you once said

The shadows stretch longer just after you go

I lose you and find you in dreams and thought-shows

I store up your attention with locks in my head

Tell me beautiful things that I already know

You held me in your lap, your voice singing low

And I felt the departure of arsenic dread

The shadows stretch longer just after you go

The lullaby kept me from rising to go

The love there was real, and heavy as lead

Tell me beautiful things that I already know

Simple to forget, that I could have said no

But tear-stained, I nodded to all that you said

The shadows stretch longer just after you go

I love you in meter, in rhythm and flow

But still need your reminders as my daily bread

Tell me beautiful things that I already know

The shadows stretch longer just after you go

Gold Bands on Arthritic Fingers

It was a birthday-candle strength that brought him here, bone-marrow reality and gold bands on arthritic fingers. It was stardust love, ushered by asteroids, tide pools and baby’s breath, miracles and malt mistakes, and here he is on the other side of echoes, fifty year old vows that he still intends to keep. I watch him as he feeds his wife, creamed corn brokenness and mashed potato depletion, his hand bringing the spoon to those lips that he kissed; he remembers hurled insults, red lipstick, long Thursdays, her lilting laugh, her camera-shy smiles. He alone now vaults the memories, her wrinkled face in his wrinkled hands, dust to dust, dependent to dependent, but she is beauty to beauty, and she’s all he can see. She hasn’t spoken in days, doesn’t have much left to say, but she knows who he is and her baby-blue eyes show it. Lantern-light and Missouri dawn, he reminds her of all she’s ever been and done, and he kisses her forehead like they’re alone in their bed, and she smiles to herself without a single word said. Loyalty that pleas the fifth, a meal a day he spends with her still in his arms, and I realize more how in love I am with you when I think to myself, “I know for mine, I’d do the same.”

Six

Specks of sawdust floating through

Caught between our roaming eyes

Digging through these professed truths

Bombarded by half-truths and lies

(We’re half a year past the night we promised to try)

The weightless dustland waste we see

Wearing on our clearer sight

Obscured by fire caught on your clothes

You drop and roll too late to fight

(I’m still fighting for you when I cry every night)

Ash to ash and hate’s debris

Settled down, you look unwell

Resuscitate with dust of space

Wandering students of love in hell

(But we picked the other up every time they fell)

The world is small compared to love

When we compare them in the light

We laugh if we wake up unsinged

But hold hands, shaking through those nights

We both promised to stay, even when it’s a fight

Lucid Dream

I’m all tremors and windstorms, God knows that I mean well,

but the only thing I can manage to do right

is to need you, and want you, and break down and miss you,

when I’m shaking alone (but still warm) late at night.

I try to stay busy, kaleidoscope daydreams,

you’d be desperate as me, if I had any choice,

but my life’s like a lucid dream that I lost hold of,

I find your hand with my hand

but then, lose my voice.