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I Miss You
Darkness has settled in around me.
I've worked myself into the ground. Dawn until beneath the moon. The cicadas and the frogs of my youth cry out. A break from the labor to light a smoke and rest my overworked legs. My ears embrace the sounds of the southern night. Calling out to me like a prodigal friend. They are different now without you. I hear a different tune. Somber and low. A silent grief upon the hills. A heavy sadness. And I look up to the darkened windows. Where once there was such life and warmth. The house sits empty and unfinished. A shadow of the past. Nights on the front porch swing and cracking walnuts on the drive.
Its almost as though you're still there. Inside that facade of the house you built. From the life you gave us. I almost expected you to greet me at the door and usher me inside for breakfast and coffee stiff and black.
But you never came. Even today its too hard to wrap the sordid mesh of my brain around your absence.
A house without a lady. Fields without an owner. A family without a Matriarch. A black sheep without a Grandmother's gentle hand filled with faith. And I miss you always but even more so today than the day before.
he watches the blossoms from his bedroom window
The magnolia bloomed
With its eyes wide open
To him holding her tight:
And I burst into pieces
Until we weaved into space
Metaphorical love ...
Found in white flowers
Blooming for a day and
She spread her legs
To fear and vulnerability
And with the mist of cold winter
In a blanket of white
He was watching the gloss --
Swaddled in ice
And his snow-kissed warmth
From his ocean of comfort
Sharp light was reflected
But melted in tears and
The deepest compassion
For a new beginning raining
And preparing him for --
Spring unexpected
In the verse of a poem
Not yet written, but felt
An Insomniac’s Insanity
Last night was a surreal trip of a fallen women found inside the folds of the thick molasses streets of her mind. Trapped by the mania, my skull grew busy with bodies resurrected by the witching hour. Their solemn pace was echoed by the erect hands of my wall clock whose face eavesdropped with judgement. Innately out of sync, the beat of my own heart fell half-time to my pulse racing in double-time through my tightening veins. And from my bedroom window I watched the night sky swell with anticipation and vast absurdity all at once. My body ricocheted with a slowed palinopsia effect, as everything around me played on fast forward. Disembodied voices shouted spoken word from the back of my head, as an uproar of Vivaldi's Spring haunted bouncing against the walls of my brain's cask. I could smell warmth permeating from beneath the earth's crust, life rushing palpably through the roots resting in the darkness. I tried to write down the words that I saw scripted in ash rising up from my own embers of flesh on fire, but my hands were paralyzed. I was completely coherent yet caught in-between the layers of white fuzz consciousness, and it somehow felt safe. In a crescendo of lifetimes erupting for one solitary night, my path was burned in front of me. The past and the future weaved into a braided communion arousing all of my senses into a state of euphoric enlightenment, and I was finally fully awake.
Love Gratified
His honey hair
Bare page skin
And eyes like thyme-leaved bluets
Tore my desire with
His tragedy and comedy
My Thalia and Melpomene
Palpably sweet to
My mind composing
Our love affair scrolling
From the beginning of time
To the end of days
Memorializing our poetry
Branded hot on
His vulnerable flesh
Touching my need with
Our bodies weaving
And seducing me into
A state of melancholy
From a conscious longing
Laced with dreamy perception
And pulsing with antiquity
Imagined and drifting
Taunted wild by illusion
And sketched permanent
Onto my Aphrodite soul
But splitting my reality
The blinding fantasy
Of a passionate novella
Found and experienced
In two strangers crossing
The Passenger
My heart heals for you, mending through the empathy I ache for you. And hope carried by compassion is resurrected, and it breathes the life back into my lungs. Your fair flesh is on fire, emanating the most beautiful light before my eyes. I love you so much, as I watch you roll your cigarette in the passenger seat of my car.
M.
Maybe if I murdered your mother
And stitched a zipper into her spine
And stepped into her pale skin
Aged with an Appalachia fog
I could exist in your world --
And zipping myself into your life
Ruminating inside your existence
I would saturate your mouth with my saliva
Moistening your heat with --
The richness of ...
My blood is sticky
I am a tightrope strapped with confusion
And I miss you.
Your boy will sail away and
Your mother stays busy
I want to slither
Like a snake under
Your knitted afghan of
Prophetic words weaved
Deceiving me and --
Leading me into
A false love borne
From faithful obligation
You told me the pool was blue
And they named you their Savior
Your demons are perched on
Your back Weakened with obligation.
I drink until the words are blurry on the page
One long run-on sentence continuing into --
Oblivion waits
And my flesh is thin
Like paper doll arms
Thin and tearing
And disconnected from
Everyone else ...
I fucking miss you,
And I can't undo this.
Better for Us Both
I regret leaving,
I truly do.
But perhaps being apart,
Will be better for me and you.
I'm not worthy
Of your unending love,
Which I take for granted.
I don't want your trust
When I have broken it
So many times.
It appears as though
You're reaching
Across a chasm
Of my own making,
When I deem myself
Unworthy of your adoration.
You're too perfect
To love one such as I,
And you deserve
A better, loving half.
But I know,
I won't regret the time
We had together,
I'll only regret
Having to leave you and
All of our memories.
Dangerous daydreamers
Even the clouds hide daydreams
Of jet plane rides that from down here
Are so far away they're hopeless
Yet hopelessly, romantics still dream
I know that the possibility of tomorrow
Can never be as tempting as
Yesterday's "could've been"
Because I can taste yesterday
I held yesterday
I labored on the foundations of yesterday
I'm not going to talk about the millions of fish in the sea
Who always seem to be sidetracked by anything shining
They're desperate to be hooked
Shallow fish in an endless sea
Waters I've chartered
By heart and stars
And prayers upon stars
Already
I look to the sky
Not for the future
The past
The clouds hide
How many nights did we lay
At the end of this runway counting jet planes
How many times did we say it would be us
One day
We gave names to the people inside
We sent them to exotic places
On adventures of love and discovery
Across the globe they'd find their hearts
Reconnect with parts of them they'd lost
Realizing answers to questions
They never knew existed
We laughed!
We lived their lives for them
Better than they did
Somehow
We abandoned our own
Daydreams got the better of today
Grounded by the reality of just how far away they really are
More work
Than we both had ever known
But I want you to know
That my head is still in the clouds
And my heart is up there
Somewhere
Still tumbling around
My Letter to a Ghost
I finally found the strength to open your book today. It is the book you left behind the last time I saw you. It is a paperback reminder of you, and it is weathered with your life. Your touch is all over it and, to look at it, it breaks my heart all over again.
A World of Ideas, and its grand compilation of insight and theories from thinkers like Ramachandran, Gould, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli; they spoke to you. And to me. I opened to a page full of your handwritten notes, and I instantly felt my heart beating again. I lifted the curling pages to my face, hoping to smell remnants of you, but you were gone—and sorrow welled in my throat. I traced the words you wrote in the columns, and visualized you writing. And I could feel so vividly the way it felt when you touched me.
When I close my eyes, I hear you voice: your speech pattern was palpable evidence of your thought process. The way you hesitated when your deepest thoughts took an extra second to come to order made me love you even more. The way the prophetic words rolled off your tongue in a visual parade of your intelligence was the most moving orchestra of art that I have ever witnessed.
You and your intelligence: the level at which your intuitive comprehension and brilliant perception functioned set you light years apart from everyone else, while simultaneously tormenting you as one of your deadliest demons.
But your gifted mind felt like home to me. And it was beautiful. When you spoke I felt the lobes of your mind swaddle me in their depth and safety. I recall the time we had to pull over to finish a conversation because it was too heavy to drive through. We had to stop moving-—be still while the Cainful world moved without order around us--— we analyzed the love theories of Schopenhauer.
Your mind was a fascinating world full of penetrating inspiration to me. My muse. I was so in love with you. Instantaneously. It was a crescendo of lifetimes spent searching for something then realized all at once in the moment I saw you. And that connection will last forever, immortally.
And now I have closed your book because I can only handle the pain in small doses. A suffering so debilitating and borne from an impossible longing to taste you again.
I am going to walk outside and breathe as deeply as I can today. I like to imagine that the air I inhale was recently exhaled by you just moments before. And so I ingest you.
But the sun looks guilty today, hiding behind the clouds in its overcast sky. It is as dirty and as depressed as I feel, but I understand. I remind myself that the heat emanating from behind its filth has been cast upon both you and me, and somehow I find comfort in the perversity of it all.
I miss you and your mind so much. Nothing will ever feel the same. I hope you are well. And I hope this is our final good-bye, so that I can move on.