My english teacher, brimming, noted
with reverent chalkstrokes on the blackboard
that the sun sank like a ship
that particular evening
the author sitting under
what must have been a cool blue ocean of sky
or perhaps a cloudy gray one
with the sun, like a 2-ton freight ship,
blindly trekking through its stormy center.


Or maybe the ship of the sun
caught the aching wind in tall white sails
that led its tight brown body,
two cupped hands,
onward by the hand of that bastard captain
eternally drunk and beaming
a sea-salt encrusted smile.

But I, in my 11th grade naivety, thought
that this simile should have been crafted a metapor
as the sun,a humble one-man sailboat
capsized quietly
just past the horizon.

My head and my heart hurt.

Summer arrived on the street corner
and stole up the sidewalk, lightfooted
wary not to muss
the simple garb of spring
which fell in soft piles on the pale green lawn

and heaped like clothes
next to the clawed foot of a porcelain bathtub
whose ivory walls cradled the lukewarm water
like an expectant lover.

No Reasons

All the things I'd like to say are already making a tired stack. They're filling me up and weighing me down. So I'm sorry if I walk a bit slower, or choke on my words. I'm sorry if I take longer, in this little mess, to find words at all.  I'm sorry for crying, but I suppose I already said that. So I'm sorry I said it, and I'm terribly sorry that I know I'll say it again. I'm sorry to the ground for the extra weight. I'm sorry if it's harder to pick me up before you'd like to gently let me down.

 "Complications of the heart always you leave you torn apart. Now you're careful what you fall into." 

His face was not noble
nor angelic
and it did not look like it had lingered longer
under the crafting hand of God
than any other
but it could, in the right lighting,
pass for a saint

a solemn one who sulked handsomely in the dark velvet
of a 17th century portrait
or a saint who
had been melted and fragmented into a stained glass window
which had its own corner in a quiet cathedral
and seemed to contemplate the organ music with such intensity
that the sunlight straining through his glass body
blared like accompanying trumpets,
bronze and thick.

Or maybe the kind of a saint
who on a cold April evening shirked his holy duites
and took a walk through the thinning night
past the house of the girl he half hoped would be awake to meet him
and half whistling a song of spiritual doubt.

If I were an artist I'd draw
a skeleton
and the bones of its feet
would rest at the bottom of the page,
not entirely anatomically correct,
but enough so
that the shins would follow lithely next
and the legs would stretch
into the smooth bowl of the pelvis

and I would place the rib cage just above
the air of the torso
and stack the vertebrae
one atop another
past the tired half-moon of the shoulders
and shape the subtle hollow of the neck

where I would rest your larynx
and deftly string your vocal chords
so you can continue your soft humming
to the tune of internal struggle
which is always swelling,
an unassuming mushroom cloud,
just past the wreckage of your broken lips.