The Tower

I would rather die than see you take this ring and turn it into what you took from her like a basketball net trying to offer me a drink of water– if you think a drop of this deluge hit you with anything but the intention of a hurricane upon the Florida coast having refused…

the spruce tips aren’t tips anymore; are fingers with bones and a tired hand– this pays the price of experience, becoming the one who butters children’s toast in the morning as if it’s something she won’t miss when autumn robs the soft caress of their unending, cloying need from off your face and the sun…

I rise to meet the quiet of the lull you break inside me in the stalwart stillness of my soul: for where winds hath howled between what’s left standing; announced the roof that burned and fell, I have also felt the air lie still and Circumspect as sunset on the prairie I despise as empty,…

You are a childhood memory and so not a real place; as foreign to me in remembrance as you were that first day– where others have the fragrance of their mother’s breast I instead have red dust and the way an acacia thorn feels rolled between your fingers; the quiet of a savannah’s promise and…

Where are my children? They’re falling like leaves and the ones I didn’t have are hid in the magic cabinet I leave bolted to a wall full of all my most enduring and protected spells; tucked neatly into a pair of tiny moccasins stood on the business card of a woman named Piya who dangled…

I haven’t found bones in the forest before (and Hark! take note–) but am left wondering if this is not a place of Death at all, or even substantiation, but something much more mediocre, like: a tired old man feeding an even older and more tiring dog who couldn’t even bother to take home his…

Mark a dotted line in time with the sound of a bird from your childhood, wakeful in the wood: “Here-here-here I am–!” foot in the sand, hair wet and cold enough to shade us both; sun on my back, including where I couldn’t reach it: I would bother asking someone else to keep from blistering…

One of my hobbies is healing and when I forget this, it is I who appear to move and think so slowly one might fairly begin to doubt the regular occurrence of either; to with gaping eyes grope nonetheless as blindly as the screeching bat at objects lying at last before me; to play at…

“Your hair looks really beautiful like that,” he says, glowing with what’s not been offered; I turn and half-smile at him ruefully and well acquainted with the way this makes me feel– resplendent in my lack of gratitude for what is no doubt well-meant, and I have been raised to count as the highest praise…

I don’t know what to say to you anymore; don’t feel you there to say anything to– remove myself from the place I say your name as if it is a prayer; not for fealty, but peace between us, which seems to mean losing touch with you altogether in this instance. But I remember wanting…