My ex almost lover slides down the page of my messages.
I've got a whole book of faces, and his is the only one I'm looking for.
I have to click the 'see all' button to even catch a glimpse of him,
And even then, it is only his back in the mirror as he walks away.

I count days, hours, moments.
I memorize lines, words, syllables.
Soon, I will make the decision to try to forget him.
The lovely ex almost lover does not know this.
He thinks (at least I imagine he does) that I've already forgotten.

But he beats a staccato song inside my chest, like a hard rain on packed, dry earth.
He wakes me every night with his silence,
Like summer coming to an end, the cicadas ceasing their chorus.  
You don't know how accustomed your ears have become,
How much you need that sound, until it vanishes,
Becoming nothing more than an echo of memory.

A week goes by before you ever realize what it is that has been intruding on your sleep.
There is an absence of the familiar,
and to keep yourself from falling off the edge into the abyss,  
'dear God, will I spend the rest of my life alone?'
(Breathe!)
That habit of loving shadows reinvents itself.


*Once, I believed in fairy tales.
Maybe, I always will.

Bury me under a thousand pounds of unwritten promises;
You are the sand that weighs heavy upon my shore.

While the shadow ghost of dreams dances lightly through currents of my remorse,
The moonlight shimmers brilliance upon your still waters.

Bury me under a thousand pounds of unwritten promises;
Hold me fast within the depths of your silent longing.

I poured my grief into your ocean;
My love fell gentle into your waves.

There are a lucky few of us, who benefit from the paltry services of the mental healthcare system.
The rest of us, well, we are the ones who walk naked down the street with absent faces.
We are the ones who sit alone and ***** on the street corners of your small town America.
Your America.
We mutter nonsense to ourselves, for the sake of a sanity that was denied us.
Denied us, yes, as we sought and sought a solution to our degradation, but we never could grasp that golden ring.

Mrs. Murphy trims her hedges.
And we walk obtrusively through the park
on your warm, sunny, sky blue happy day,
seeking love and connection with our own humanity in the garbage receptacles
that are scattered down the paths of our solitary confinement.

And in your eyes?  Yes, yours!
We seek our solace, our redemption.
If only a single soul would glance up,
and connect with the eyes of our soul starved, 'yes, here I am, friend!'

We seek the self same recognition that you do.
We seek that opportunity to be.
That opportunity to be loved.

Oh lover!   Your absent heart has left me wanting.
Your unfocused mind has left me wandering.
You are a playing field, and I am the ball.*

Bounce me.


Words are funny things;
We think we know them;
We think we have mastery over them,
That they are ours to manipulate.

But words, they have a life of their own,
And the power they can speak, we do not fully grasp.

Maybe, words will spill out of you tomorrow morning
As the sun lifts it's brow,
And you are in your bathrobe drinking coffee.
Will you be waiting for them?   Will you listen?

Maybe.

Or, perhaps you will be engrossed in the sports section
When the next clear moment arrives.
And you will miss hearing it.

And those words will fly on past you
And settle on the ears of another,
Less inclined to avoidance of the truth.

I lowered my bucket into the well of words
And raised it up, hand over fist,
While syllables and phrases sloshed about,
Some spilling over
In my eagerness to drink them deep.

Oh, how I wanted to be filled up.


The words poured out,
And they emptied into the clay jar of my disconnected soul,
Rubra terra terra firma incognita
Plant me deep and water these roots.
(Am I real? Will I always be?)

And oh, how they filled me up.

I spoke the words aloud,
And they slithered between the cracks of my shattered glass self,
Amber crackled sunlight streaming right on through,
It looked like I would go on forever (and ever, ever)

And oh, the words broke me open.

Yesterday, I printed some of my poems.
Black letters on ivory, one hundred percent cotton, twenty-four pounds.
It felt strange to hold my words in my hands,
making concrete, that abstract part of myself.

Here is the proof, there is more to me.
There is more.

Is it really possible to uncover these secret,
hidden places within myself?

Are a rose, and the scent of a rose, one and the same?

We walked along and I thought about
the green birds I wanted to show you,
the crunch of crushed red granite beneath my feet,
and the way your hand lightly bumped into mine,
asking the question your mouth could not.