Je serai poète et toi, la poésie.*
I will be the poet and you, the poetry.

But it is not the words
That I scribbled out in arduous hand,
The slopes of my letters,
That quite encompass
The ***** of you leaning against
The pane of my window in the rains.

Nor is it the soft cursive
In which I gently wrote down
Your expression when a flake of snow
Soft and tender;
Rustling through the branches of fir
To land on your nose,
Ever so gently;
That can quite tell the world
What your clear laughter does
To an hour of gloom.

I knew then,
That my mind, with its fractured
Concepts disjoint syllables and tripping verse might not be capable
Of putting pen to paper
And recall your fiery eyes,
When they pierce the veil of
Young melancholy
And beckon me to act my age,
And not a morbid royal spinster.

And I thought of how you knew
In far more precise details how
After a weary day, I flopped down
On to the couch in monotonous exhaustion
Wiping my brow, shaking off the
Metaphorical dust.
You knew, far better than me,
The blurred movements of my hands
As I traced words in the air.

I watched you watch me
Move and I watched as you noted
The crest of every breath I took.

And I thought.

Tu sera poète et moi, la poésie.
You will be the poet and I, the poetry.

Cigarettes.
Pills.
Newspaper clippings.
Governmental conspiracy books.
No friends.
No family.
No food.
No water.
Just lying in the dark,
day after day,  
Until your heart gave out.

I have documented proof in the form of bills, bank statements, and autopsy reports that this was what the last years of your life were like.

I now lie awake in the same room where I figure you must have spent all of your time,
looking at the ceiling,
wondering if it was the last thing you saw.


I have felt myself become increasingly anti-social, bitter, violent, cold, paranoid, critical and reclusive over the years,
and I know that if I let myself continue to slip away,
I will end up just like you,
in this same room,
staring at the same ceiling,
with my face that looks just like yours,
with nothing to comfort me except for the fading memories of the love I like to think I once felt.


There were ten thousand books in this house the first time I came to see it,
piled high in every room,
ghosts in the ashes between every page...


I'm scared,
but you were the one who taught me to take pride in the land I live on,
so I will turn it into something beautiful,
and I won't let this place be haunted anymore.

I’d done it before—losing that feeling that came in the door
when my love walked through, that the ground I was
standing on wasn’t quite steady and the world was spinning
the other way—but he loves me back this time, so now guiltily solid,
I watch as he shakes, head over heels with that feeling
I'm losing and painfully, I remember when both our axes
tilted right instead of left, when earthquakes followed our footsteps.

Memories play out flailing limbs
skin and bones reacting
Eyes down, up looking.
I cannot lie or surprise
tiny seeds grow.
Magnificent aroma in deep
across the world of Man.
Bees and butterflies short lived
die for so much less.

I will settle in to the storms and waves
And find peace in the gaps

The spaces between set-up and torn-down

From cliff to cliff
We’ll find heart in the air that separates
where we were to the places we are going

This is for the girls who are not skinny enough
and the boys with lack of muscular arms and six packs.
This is for the kids who take a blade to their skin when it gets too hard
and then cry themselves to sleep at 4 am.
This is for the kids who can not sleep without the drugs
and the ones who sleep to forget the reality in which they live in.
This is for the kids whose daddy's ran away
and mommy is working 3 jobs to just buy dinner.
This is for the kids whose parents do not care
and the only thing they give are bruises.
This is for the kids who hate themselves so much
and the ones who are trying to find love.
This is for the teenagers who are doing their best
and the adults trying to find their way in this big world.
This is for everyone who does not hear it
and those who do not believe it.
**You are enough.