Saturday Night Live

The trash ghosts in piles at the backdoor -
the mans work around the house is stacking up -
junk litters the backyard.

I make it home at 2 am
to an invisible chastisement,
the yells echoing with me down the halls
and into my bedroom
where his left behind book sits open
half-read

and he's somewhere in Florida
watching Saturday Night Live
laughing maybe
maybe wondering, like me, how the hell
he's supposed to fall asleep.

He said, I have all of you but I want less.

Like a half finished course at dinner,
here I have had enough.
Here take your heart
here take your limbs
here take your sad eyes and your hurt
and take it quick please
I can't look at it anymore.
It's become too tangible
too like a stranger
like a third person ghosting
in the backseat.

I have all of you, he said, but I want less.
Here take your words.
Take your words and swallow them whole
take yourself back into yourself.
Take your words like medicine
and choke them back down your throat.

I have all of you, he said, but I want less.
Here take your teeth.
Take your lips and your tongue.

Here, he said, leaning forward
take your breath.

Not what has made me, but I am what has unmade me. The drifting apart of sleepless nights, the soul stretching of heartache, the pull of the infinite, the silence. The words that seeped in and diluted my blood and shadowed the lines between my skin and everything else.

The longing for you that reduced me to a ghost.

...

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
― Cormac McCarthy

I suppose that I always expected trouble, but I never expected you. You with your honest eyes and soft shoulders and innocent hands always running through your hair. You with your innocent hands. Trouble's hands aren't innocent and trouble doesn't use adjectives the way you do and trouble doesn't close its eyes.

It wasn't new. Trouble was always there, the way bruises are, lurking,waiting, under the surface of the skin. Taking but one hit, one impact, to spread blue-black and visible and sore to the touch.

You would think I would forget. You would think, after all this time, this shaping and reshaping of the heart, you would have been lost. You would have slipped into the blood stream and drown or tiptoed through my tunnel bones and stumbled out my finger tips. You would have clawed up my throat and exhaled, like breath.

You would think, when the snow fell, you would step outside. Catch a snowflake on your upturned hand. Grab your coat and boots and venture out, venture away. But it seems, when the storm came,you closed the door and shuttered the blinds and retreated further into the dark cave of my heart.

I suppose I always expected trouble,but I never expected that trouble was you.

Early Peach

Fall fell like an early peach. Just ripe, orange-y and nude and flesh colored, like the underbelly of a salmon. Warm and humming with a heart-like pit at the center of its covered fruit. Size like the palm of a hand. Soft on the teeth and fuzzy on the tongue and round, like a vowel, in the mouth. Round and sweet. Sweet with an ancient sweetness so that even earth, upon tasting it, intook breath, closed her sad summer eyes.

Sometimes truth shoves you up against a wall and kisses you, like a boy. And your stomach drops to your knees and you catch your breath, because you weren't expecting it. And sometimes truth walks up to your door, and stands on the porch while you run around frantically downstairs getting dressed, doing your hair. Truth waits until you come to the door, breathless.

You and truth have a got a way of running in to each other. I guess it's a small city, and the truth is big, it always has been. Sometimes you wonder how something so big, so universal, so inevitable as truth fits so quietly in your hand. You wonder how it fits its hands around your waist. You wonder how it speaks, why you listen, because truth has never been loud.

And mostly you wonder how truth got into your room, how truth entered your house in the first place. Don't you always forget to lock the back door? Now truth is sitting on your bed and truth's shoulders are so soft and eyes so blue it almost breaks your heart. It almost breaks your heart, truth does.

Sometimes truth holds you while you cry. Sometimes truth holds you while you cry not knowing that the reason you're crying is because of him. Sometimes truth grabs your hand, tucks your hair behind your ear, asks you to stay, not knowing that the truth shall set you free. Not knowing that the truth shall let you go.

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.