You will always be yesterday

We all need a muse
and those who make us happy
don't cut it.

I have washed my hands of you
a hundred times.

On Memory & Dreams

You used to be bubbly in my nose:
a giggle contorted into a laugh,
my cheeks pink
from it.

I haven't yet decided why we write about nostalgia.

Either we haven't accepted the present.
Or we have not let go of

candy-coated ice cream crunching beyond the brain freeze.

I remember: in college you told me not to smile.

Your photograph forever sepia because you are always yesterday.

I consistently forget tomorrow.


This feels like hope but it drowns in the city surrounding:
I don't know you.

You, city: gray-faced and hostile stare into my bedroom window.
You pull the trigger and another is dead on our front porch.

And I say our but there is only me.
My bed is a twin. There is one toothbrush by the sink.

The new blood stains my shoes and is washed away in your rain.


This, God, is someone else. This is a passerby in my fingerprint.
I am better for it. You remind me to cry. Our eyelids are white.

I can see the veins in Your forehead.
You draw me a map.

Prayed tonight for a peppermint sunrise,
but the snow melts off the trees outside.

Lungs weave a lilting sigh: it's butterflies,
trapped in silent nights.

If icicles can hold their breath just a little longer,
we will wait to catch them in our mouths.

like flakes, we get a little stronger,
muffle a cry so no one finds us out.

I think He's all around us. I think He hears you breathe.
I think He's wrapped inside us. Even when we clench our teeth.

A fragment. Not folly. Subject predicts the fol-low-ing of:
His presence; we volley--treading water,
just to drench our skin with Him.

FP

you bump against the core of me
like two noses rubbing so eyes can still
stare into, and into, and into each other.

my middle is warm and quiet, whispers love, but waits
silent as I smile into your skin.

Tonight cars are creeping past the window.
Yellow streetlights blink--on, off--on, again
and are green, and red, between each waiting.
The whole world hums.

Tonight, I am alone but am not lonely.
The T.V. on: soundless, and soothing;
familiar, and strange.

The cold slips in the window, its breath
a whisper on skin: exposed, to the elements
of memory, and of future, and of now.

Tonight, fingers reaching, to the blankets.
I pull, the velvet, sky down.

I see things out of the corners of my eyes and sometimes I think it's you--yes, you--and I remember because you never really left.

i miss you, in short.

nailed to every poem, an inside joke
on your insides (turned inside-out
so i can see: your flesh, on the table,
like we're all made of the same stuff.)

and i think we were at one time but not
anymore, because you're still--addicting--,
still laughter, still make me think "ladder"
think "death cab" think floors,
& we stare at ceilings (I think I wrote
you, once) instead of carpet stuck
under our nails.