Poem Written During a Week Without

Hateful week,

the rainy frustration of you, nowhere to be found.

I’ve lost my watch,

the days squish like soggy ashes,

sitting still, unyielding to moon or stars.

. . .

Do you know I loved sitting on that wall next to you,

bushes scratching my bare shoulder like kitten claws?

Do you know I count each moment like a bead,

string them on the transparent floss

of laughter until I have length enough to wind up my arm?

. . .

No.

I never told you more than I like your tie.

Not a word of we belong.

. . .

But where are you and don’t you know

you should be here with me?

Because I have a light for you,

growing like a tigerlilly

out of the pulp of this gray week.

 

Driving Poem

Driving North with you in the music,

my arms in twilight remind me how you make

the world feel gentle around me.

. . .

I sing words that are not mine.

I sing words in cracked and shabby voice,

words that make me desperate for language to tell you

all the ways I learned to break my own heart.

. .

Sitting still, moving forward.

Dusk dyes a flock of sheep indigo.

. . .

Let me tell you things I recall to pass time,

(because you are everywhere now,

throbbing against me like gravity in this music)

such as,

I saw your thumbprint and mine

woven together on a small pane of blue glass,

hatched intricately,

inseparable,

like delicate grooves in a shell.

8/27/00

Last Day of Summer

Dolphin colored sky. 

I walk towards that spot in the sand

where we may or may not have sat through dusk and the noise of others 

until the vault of heaven opened, giving me words

(“Look! The stars!” )

before I realized you only wanted to touch my silence. 

…

Is is that when it started?

The waves curled into infinite qiestion marks and 

we suddenly realized we were in darkness, 

the world no longer the same,

 our skin no longer our own. 

…

Is that when I became this creature in a shell,

opening and closing to let you nourish me

with all the healing properties of salt water?

 

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/daily-prompt-one/

Paul’s Haiku

indigo half shell

sea moist silver gleams inside

until dusk conceals

. . .

The journals are filled with a shit ton of crappy poetry, like the above.  I went back to them thinking there would be a linear story to follow, that there would be a prose explanation for everything we did.  But the dusty books are filled with scraps of paper, napkins, receipts, on which I scribbled random notes and lines.  None of which are particularly good or sensical.

I wrote this little haiku in the first days of our flirtation.  It makes me realize how disjointed the affair made my mind from the get go, how it dislocated my reality from its socket and left me with these frayed tendons of thought.

August 24, 2000

Clouds like dragons,

clouds like birds.

The two of us dangle our feet

off the edge of evening and

drink sunset colored cocktails.

…

I am ready to slip over this ledge,

feel my body slice the space,

silent as a fish.

…

I know you would not understand

if I told you

shipwreck visions float

up with the freckles on your forehead.

And would you be anything less than offended if I said

in your arms, I am held by a ghost?

…

The sky is bruised with violet continents,

and the first stars, so far off, make me feel

I am sinking,

but it is the sinking into a vast sleep

where I will rise and float.