[11] Every Bright and Momentary White String

Once I raced a thunderstorm, but last night I drove into one. With every bright and momentary white string that ran straight to the sky, my lungs felt like a tree that emptied every branch. Because these days–shall I call you brother and sister?–I feel like an ocean tide, waking and sleeping, driving and falling. In my ever maddening mind I am only defined by my screaming opposite, which I told you today makes me a shadow because I only exist when the sun falls on me once and a while. We sat together in a church pew a few states away and all I could let out of my mouth was “Why couldn’t it have worked this way?” and you didn’t hear me say “I need you right this very second.” You want to know me so desperately and yet you only saw my utter weakness inside when the telephone poles and wires were snapping under the wind and I woke up infected with sleep. I’ve been gone every Sunday and I’m afraid to come home because you never saw me in pain and I’m just waiting for your love to run out. I am the three week old shadow and you’re just dying for the sun to go away. (How could you stand next to your brother and leave your daughter in pain?)

[10] Steep Away

He said she smells like rose hips and mint and when I’m around her I’m completely lost… And lost indeed because we’re afloat, sitting on a canoe in the ocean with a Union Jack burning above us and all of the stars are pushing their light through the Milky Way to howl at us and our flag on fire. She said the weather in his mind is always stormy and I’m afraid he’ll never see the sunlight in me, “but how can I tell him that when I told our own city to swirl with rain and be swollen with static?” You see the rain fall to the concrete or on the hoods of our sweatshirts. Maybe you see stars or maybe you see the left over tears that we threw at the ceiling that are coming down on our heads. The girl that smells like roses fell asleep while she was boiling water for tea, but you know it’s waiting for you, waiting for you. Turn off the stove and steep (sleep) away.

[9] Little Pots of Tea

I set the fire in your veins when I took my socks and books from your house. No more little pots of tea or bowls of rice over new music you couldn’t wait to show me. Maybe this week of rain will cool the fire and perhaps we’ll wake to each other like a rainy campground on Independence Day. The edges of the damp tent, a sheen of water clinging to the sleeping bag, the smell of wet mulch, and a fire that’s been dying quietly under the rain now full of charcoal that can absorb all our poison.

[8] Windchimes

With windchimes at my wrists, my broken heart will make a scene. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. I am a child who wanders into the dining room with all the adults still talking with their chinking teeth and coffee cups. I am told softly to be off to bed and am quietly sent out of the room. Or, I am walking through an old and empty house, and after turning a few corners through the corridors, only more doors appear and the maid says “Why, I haven’t told you, there are seven stories to this house,” and disappears without any mention of stairs. Everything collapsed just in time for summer, when the taste of the season’s first apple and the sunlight will sweetly sew me back together. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. “I’ll always be alive as long as it’s you holding me to death.” The approach of the deep terror and fear does not coming from failing, of alienation, but from speaking and throwing words to you across the room for you to catch and you never hear me. The words fall like drops around your ears and you never even notice it’s raining. The threat of death comes not from a physical death but from a tired boredom; a futility and the understanding of meaninglessness that slows down the heart ever so softly until one day it stops. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. I’m sent with a candle across the pond in my small canoe. The three day old goslings asleep under a wing on the flooded bank. I’m sent into sleep, into slumber, and gifted with dreams of the hour before I say those two little words, dreams of the weeks before a girl sleeping inside my stomach breathes air for the first time, dreams of the feeling of the paintbrush in my hand and the vats of liquid color for the paintings that are to come to pass and come alive, dreams of witnessing a death. What are these? Messengers? These deep and sleeping statues come to me in the middle of the night, each holding their own candle while I wake into a thousand pieces. With windchimes at my wrists, my broken heart will make a scene.