Nutmeg

The kids these days are smoking nutmeg.

Can you believe it?
The things we won't do for a high.

Chasing dream clouds is a nice enough pastime, until the taste of all the smoke goes stale.

When burnt lungs want oxygen, they'll find it in a dying black balloon. It's personal but, I found mine in love.

The things we won't do for our fix.

I write my fix letters with a quill.
If you come back you'll be wonderful. If you come back I'll be beautiful. If you come back I'll let you lie to me again.

I'm not proud of this.

I've noticed, if you take your brag book photographs of all those seedy nights you thought you were happy, and you wave them hard enough, the wind will start a dust storm.

I see faded Polaroids of destruction where others see a Kodak moment. Then they point out the quill in my hand. The plank in my eye.

I guess I'm getting older.

I only use nutmeg in my lattes,
and even then, it's only a pinch.

Lucky Charms

I am the benchmark
I am evolution
I fight the fire with fire
Caffeine veins and stuffy noses
Nothing new under the sun
Meaningless changes
To the Lucky Charms in my bowl
Why the swirly moons?

You won't find better than me
Darling, rest assured
They won't love you like I did

This Dark Machine

I came unprepared for this undrinkable sea-water mixture of responsibility and still there it is, desire. Did I think I could wipe clean the slate that had driven me into the machine? I went in full of wonder and came out with all my bones broken. It was a fairground I went looking for I think, but what I found instead was the kind of one-and-a-half-sided Rubik’s-cube love story that made me profess, I’d rather take a closed-fist beating from him than ever live through that again. This dark machine surprised me, a carousel on fire like a phoenix, leaving no ashes for me to rise from, and I only had dripping wax wings to madly flap toward the sun with, and fall into the ocean, and sink, dragged by the weight of what could have been a lot of Yankee Candles. I always liked the buttercream one the best.

The World Was Lighter Than Eight Pounds

In that beeping, whirring factory, they set the weight of the world on my chest. The world was lighter than eight pounds. She was sighing in dreaming. The room, now shaking with exhaustion, was still anchored to the quaking earth by a solid reality, an air-solid reality, a new breath adding carbon dioxide to where stores of waiting life had just been. Perfection has been manifested here, the pain edged off by seventy five years of promise in my hands. Her big grey-blue eyes show me where to look. Her hand fits around my finger, points it toward the concrete above us. I know I must have never really loved before now, bleeding from our family ties, grateful even still that I was ripped open, open by a ray of sunshine that struggled to get out. The sky needed more sunshine more than it just needed more me.

Handfuls of Sunshine

From summer to autumn and autumn to winter, whenever I came across it, I would bring him little handfuls of sunshine. “Look what I found for you!” It was almost a daily occurrence. The dusty yellow would bleed into the grey air that he breathed. My excitement was always genuine. I was always trying to crack the code. How do you make someone love you? Some days he would smile. Some days he wouldn’t. Most days he would put me out. He always wanted to close the blinds.

Slowly, I learned that you can’t straighten enough hand towels or cook enough meals or apply enough coats of mascara to be good enough for anybody. You can’t write enough letters. You can’t strategize; love is not a chess game. You can’t simplify; love isn’t exactly checkers either. All you can do is expect the stars to come out every night. All you can do is expect the sun to rise every morning. You can breathe in, you can breathe out. You can take some of your sunshine and begin to keep it for yourself.

Maybe everything that I did was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t sunshine that he needed anyway. Maybe it’s better that we’re free from each other.

I can’t believe all that yet. My hands are still heavy-laden with the light I wanted to share with him. But maybe someday I will believe it. Maybe someday it won’t be so hard.

After the Storm

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown back and into the wind by the storm. The valuables are shattered. The love letters are beyond repair. I’m digging through water-logged possessions in desperation. Is not one thing salvageable?

 “I tried to save it,” I hear myself say. “I tried, I tried, I tried. But it’s ruined.”

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown back and into the wind by the storm. My skin crawls with bedbug lies. I sleep covered in six-legged nightmares. Everywhere I go, I feel them following in my shadow. Is not one place safe?

“I can’t live like this,” I hear myself say. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I will die.”

I look out over what’s left of us. Everything thrown up and into my lap by the storm. The pictures disintegrating in soppy, Technicolor rainwater. The ceiling dripping into my hopeless, clean hands. His hands are covered in blood.

“I love him,” I hear myself say. I feel myself shake with the thick silence that follows, the silence that says, But it doesn’t matter.

I look out over what’s left of us. I reach for the doorknob. The light is blinding. He doesn’t follow me. I walk away from his flood alone.

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