Ancestral Forest

Your name is the kind of word that poets say softly to themselves as they scribe it on paper.
And the quicker your sandy being slips through my hourglass, the stormier the skies become as I cease in my ability to reckon with the roundness of the roads.
Burying myself in the crannies between rose petals, growing into winter glory on the outside of your window, where your fireplace turns your skin an amber gold, and the reflection of the moon upon my hair gives me steel silver slices on the crevices on my cheeks.
The slightest breeze could knock you over onto the empty plains of the American past. No closure for a period made up of people wishing they were older than the magazine's paper binding.
Celsius or Fahrenheit, you'll always be cooler than me, and I'll never be hotter than you.
Paris was dominated by a Marxist-Freudian-Nietzchian paradigm. Your ballot was taped to the wall of your living room, upon which you had written VOID and scribbled a poem about someone who had forgotten you exist.
Is this a poem about someone who has forgotten I exist?

Does everyone have an ancestral forest? Because if we do, I think my tree was planted next to yours and that, really, I have no choice. My branches can't help but reach for your leaves until the last sun has set on over the last ocean on the West.

Tongue Tied

The dust was flying through the sun streaming through the window as she tipped her bed to the side. It slid out like it wanted to be found, all orange and dusty, faded because of the time she had forced past. She didn't remember anymore why she kept it at all, and the way that it had begun to deteriorate, it seemed as though the world hated the way she was then almost as much as she does now. The noises of the room were hot and sticky, and her fingers felt their way onto the pages easily, muscle memory, like seconds ago she tucked it underneath her sleeping body, tears streaming down her face. The pages fell easily, all worn and over-worked, limp and flexible, an old pair of shoes that have molded to the shape of your walk.
She flipped through, her eyes scanning through the words she used to use, her lips stringing into a smile for the way that her mind had attempted to find solace in the middle of the inky circles and coffee stains.
But her heart couldn't take the way your handwriting filled up the middle page. She could see it all so clearly, the way that you held the pen with your eyes closed, writing out of your mouth instead of your mind. She never let anyone touch that notebook before you. Not after you either.

"For every day that you want to be my first cigarette, I want to call you bella. Every night."

She remembered why she kept it all these years. With a sad smile, she slid it back under her mattress to be found again someday. Until then, she would hold your words like a prayer and hope that you might come back to prove it all true.
She couldn't believe you, but she couldn't believe either that you'd lie.

strikethrough

I let myself be caught by your corners
where I sit next to the doll you lost in second grade
and the confetti from New Year's Eve circa 1999.

There's only kindness from the forgotten,
lade with appreciation for recognition of a smile
from the shell-self you're giving out now,
who mumbles words and phrases on repeat
hoping nobody notices.

Oneiric musings let my minutes slowly pass
until you pass
and we hold our breath,
the doll, the confetti, the dust, and I,
to see.

What I wouldn't give to know what you thought of me then
if you thought of me then
when
your clouds were cotton candy and the Seine
was warmed sugar butter and you bothered to lend
out your paperclips to make art instead of words.

Trace me wantonly and burn your calendar until messages are optional and impermanent.

her prayer

There's no such thing as chance;

She saw God reflected in all the shimmering words of the morning

and when she asked for an escape from the troublesome quarantine of her mind, it fell into her pockets like loose change that might have been there all along.

My flight was delayed for rain on a sunny afternoon and I happened to meet my soul mate in the time I spent perusing the magazines, wishing I was flying. 

She couldn't wait to tehila and halal until her mouth when dry and her bones were bare and she was giving more than she had to an ultimate she didn't understand.

In the name she still has trouble spelling, she prays.

Since

Since I fell, the underside of the moon reflected the motion of my bricking boundaries. Everything beautiful you could have said started waltzing through my mind like the youthful memories you painted in the snow. Graciousness was lost on my obsolete threshold, but your proximity to my dreams was good enough for a chapter or two. 

I handed you my heart in a pile of books and I've missed you ever since. 

Calypso

They hadn't considered my ability to weave the web across the windows. I wasn't just a widow anymore, all adorned in the mourning for my past that had come so strongly when I found the nuisance of the city dissipating underneath my palms. Plated like Achilles, all guarded under Hades word, I strung underneath and around them like a knitting arachnid and a haunted memory. She was sick beside me. So sick she was with wondering that harkening to the realization that she made other people matter, by existing we made other people matter, when we kissed we made the world matter, she slept soundly as the fever's fervor pushed and pulsed with a carriage like the coming of the sun through her veins. Every night that it rained, the music blessed her skin with tears from the afterlife. I wept for her children that couldn't be mine, and I thundered through her lightning bolts like a monsoon. Together we were a storm.
We made the world matter when we darkened the skies and she never struck the same spot twice. You could hear me for miles, and you continue to judge your fate from the sound of my voice. I call to you and flock her light until the blackness of my clouds and the whiteness of her flashes become something of a postcard for the apocalypse.

Come home to me, Calypso. Come rain on my fire and put me to sleep.  

Autobody

It was over in seconds. She dropped the end of the string and began to recite spoken word in her native tongue instead of looking me in the eye like she used to when I loved her back. But she bit my tongue instead of having me speak out against her ethnographically denoting economy, pointing to the sunrise over the Pacific like we were hanging in Hawaii, and ignoring the point of the Mediterranean whatsoever.

“I need you,” she drew a wheelchair across the wall and scribbled her initials at the bottom. She crippled herself every night when the moonlight manufactured existentialism on yonder bare field. Black eyes and black religion, she never cared about her knives until I started telling her they were sharp.

It was over in seconds like she won and I lost. It was over before it began like I tied us to a pine tree a month before Christmas. It was over and she couldn’t forget my teetering fantasies that were lingering underneath her fingernails because she refused to clean them out.

I’m a dirty kind of machine. The autobody shops don’t fix my type anymore.