reworking july 24, 2019

The families we make for ourselves across oceans across time
Patchwork our lives yours dovetails with mine
Stitches like dark lonely roads we drive
Across the meadow do you see the light
It’s to say if you come I’d open the door
It’s to guide you through the night

moment/momentum/momentous

seeing the picture of you in the hockey rink
my stomach shivers, the warmth of the moment in the cold
the feeling of you and it real, it often such a dream
warm and cold at the same time you say
our fingers aren't blue as we shake next to each other
to grab your hand, to sit beside and watch you in awe
of the simplicity, my insides shivering like a flame
figuring how to make our happinesses intersect
the space in between a cocoon in which to exist
out in the world we trade glances
all newness, like the ice in front of us
and the players gliding, falling and bouncing up
sticks and pucks, graceful and fierce
guarding and daring, taking chances in heavy armor
when the whale fills up with snow, find me in its core
we'll tunnel in the melting diamonds
living in the moment in the space of its chest
we can both be jonah, you and me
as they skate below us in time
fingers gliding, tracing limbs
momentous sublime.

i have to find a way for this to be enough

your words across a page

the memory of your face upon the pillow

to push it at an arm’s distance

the gold in my hand glittering

at an arm’s distance

at the distance i can understand.

without reservation

her face flipping in my mind, back and forth
right in front of me, this shyness
her eye staring and her mouth saying nothing

and the moment after i say the words
shivering on the concrete
she is standing there watching me
and she says them back

the ending i didn't bear to believe
the ending i didn't even think of
just the need to say the words, to not have
them rattling around inside of me for another two weeks

two weeks two weeks
wanting it all at once, to drown in the sugar dangerous
this extension silent torture as i awake from feverish dreams
oh yesterday feels like it was just a dream

your soft cheek and the way you twisted your legs around mine
the way you let me in beyond
lying there breathing in the silence
letting me hear the things you shouldn't have noticed but did

and now we're in this inbetween space
and i wish you were here with me actually

wanting to ditch all my history, feeling fully once again
the weight the power of simple side by side existence
that makes me feel so happy and so sad

these simple things to live for
the softest things that break us

that i know will break me, will shatter me, even as i try not to look into a future i don't understand

all i want to do is hold you right now
and not try to understand.

dia de los muertos

i feel like i’m hurting a lot right now and i don’t really understand
why still seeing you walking down the street and choosing to ignore you can derail me
imagining you with your hands on my face painting it white
imagining your laugh, the dab of the black on your fingers
your swinging cross on the chain, the jesus above your bed
the way your hood was pulled tightly around your face as you walked by
as i pretended you didn’t exist as a way to grasp blindly for some sort of power
the hurt that is worse for being inadvertent

unfinished business that i’m beginning to realize you may never finish
that keeps hurting

and the way we walked around new haven that night
faceless, invigorated by the mask glued right above our skin
you calling your mother and watching me trying to read me in the watson basement
the mask that you created not letting you in

i feel its return now
as it raises from below my skin
like when we watched coco and i looked over at you and you were silently weeping
an action i had never seen on you
the hurt that makes us turn mean to protect ourselves

as you danced with me without caring in the abandoned plaza
and asked me if i was even hispanic months later

the light and the heavy becoming confused
indistinguishable to the untrained eye

that wasn’t there to feel the punch in the gut
or the surge of an inexplicable happiness---

the kind you don’t want to speak of
that glows golden on the inside of your skin

a warm secret against your chest.
and as we pass I feel cold

steeling myself into feigned ignorance
beyond the smile i know is on your face every familiar detail pains me
lingering inside for the rest of the night
in ways i can't explain.

monday nights

sitting here in my room

mackenzie’s voice in my ear

as she imagines her children

dressing them in twenty years

she says on sundays they’ll do art

talk about feelings and play tunes

she turns life into visions

fantasies of full moons

she says her mother tells her not to daydream

not to plan the future out

that things could be unexpected

the way it all turns out

but sitting here in this chair

listening to her spin her life

i think how the story is the point

as a dream not a design

and sitting here i think maybe i ought to make lists
the romantic poem & the one i love, that i think
is lost in the early morning truck eyes--
fragments of poems i once wrote, following
me around in their unfinished lyrics, giving me
warmth and coldness with their half-taken breaths, and I,
searching for warmth now. fingers numb
like frozen purple plums in the icebox, like
faces when the blood seeps out, enjambing all over the place
to try and replicate? the state of my thoughts, to
try and write something worth following. and yet
everything is poetry, the books not written to be so,
the cars as they splash dirty water on the granite curbs
of earlier times are poetry, the man with his wet hat brim
is poetry, even the car that honks at me late night as
i walk home from the library, the figure that yells, "how's it going good looking?"
is poetry. the poetry not just the elongated pain of self narration
of wanting a you and not wanting you, there is poetry in
not saying anything. there is poetry in the underpass of the
highway that tore the neighborhood apart. poetry in the planners
and poetry in the families. there is poetry in the way the writer writes
about it one hundred years later, and you can see her hair up at the nape of her neck
her light notes and late nights in a library, her love, there is poetry
in her simple love. and maybe its like raab said,
it is not in putting all the details together. i do not know of an epic poem.
i do not know of a grand designed structure that could fit this all in one.
an anthology of everything from the center of the sole of your shoe, to the birthmark
above an eyebrow. maybe the pieces after all are enough. or maybe i focus
on the word enough too much these days.

a hot pink hairbrush

i hate you so much!
you have no compassion!
heartless!

you are unaware of how to be nice to other people!

and yet!

i keep coming back!

how can i mistreat myself so!

how can i devalue myself so!

how can i let myself wallow so!