when you are both leaving (and now, apart.)

What about when you are both leaving?
Does that make it mutual?
Or are you left 
Each individually
To carry the weight of the departure
And the being departed from?
The juncture of separation
The split of the bough, the river
Proof of time
Flowing, growing, lived together
And now, apart.

I thought only you fell asleep like that

I thought only you fell asleep like that

(This is how things are in the beginning,

Greedy, Everything for the taking, 

it all belongs, to you).

Yesterday I feel the slight symptoms

and I think it is coming, and it does

until a He, the wrong He is jolted awake

by the siren. did you fall asleep too? he asks.

almost, you lie

Still each time, I feel that same first thrill

of witness

as someone slips beyond you into slumber

as you feel them fall between your fingers

into dream

(it is a private (precious) thing).

the hope of the fool vs the hope of the star

oh baby

my loved one

built of ignorant sugar and the taste of honey

one melts one is the product of travel

one is defended by the memory of the stings

even knowing as you do

that it can all fall apart

darling girl, that it will fall apart

can you let yourself

can you choose want

in this moment not the drunken kind

angrily ignorant of pitfalls

but the one of the sun rising over the horizon

in the morning

the one that is so constant

that makes no promises

but to endure.

from the floor of the netto aisle

Can you handle it?
He asks me
And I say yes
I think I’ve got it under control
Fallen strawberries
A bruised heart
Two years of grief
And a low tolerance
For rejection.

Thinking of you

So you left me a token of your unspoken love
Words in your hand cautious and clear print
Only a hint of feeling more
Could have gone unnoticed
Gifted me a moment of surprise
What it must’ve been like to live through your eyes

I never realized
How special it might have made you feel
You know that I love you
Don’t you?
You must know what I feel

Today I was thinking what lessons did I learn
From being with you
About my own judgment hasty and freewheeling
Swallowing two
About your own propensity to fence yourself in
About us both double projecting
How some things never get their ending
But that can’t rob you of the time

I clean my entire room
Face wet with tears blue
Happy, sad, gratitude
Thinking of you.

everything is changing

You stood in the doorway standing and waving 
And I trusted my heart to do what it needed to
When I have to say something or it will break me
I always do

But I let you leave

And I was kind
Brushed over the pain you also felt
You never say it out loud
But I always wear it clear

And you’re gone now

And I can’t change a thing
And everything is changing

pitahaya

you never get to choose endings

in the way you think you will

(I keep rummaging for the bow

for the thing that will tie it all together

and coming up empty-handed,

there are always loose ends left

in the end) 

today impulsively I pay an exorbitant amount

for a pitahaya sliced in two wrapped in plastic wrap

in the supermarket 

(I see it and it reminds me of you, provenance: Ecuador)

and as I dip my spoon into the flesh I think how it looks like

the inverse of the night sky, I think of your descriptions of

looking at the stars from the porch of the farm

a view that was too far for me to ever go to

and I imagine you and your father growing these fruits

how it felt to pull one from a tree, to test its ripeness,

and now on the table in front of me

scooped out leaving only a dark pink skin

it looks somewhat like

a heart.