From the book…

Silhouette

I draw lines of water droplets
Into the calm stream
Unmoving
Beneath my eyes
Where I find reflections of your face
Staring at my unmoving form
Whose tears
Now unhidden
Share your presence with a world
Undeserving in its forgetfulness
While I am consumed by the loss of futures imagined
With each day’s dusk
As sunsets collapse yesterday
Into this rotation
And distance multiplies into
Mirrored reverberations
Where your voice becomes muffled
With the passage of that time
That others say
Heals wounds
But simply creates in me
An emptiness
That you once filled
And no longer embody
In anything
But my dreams
Shared with your lost mind
Disembodied at hands I
Failed to still
Failed to hold
Allowed to turn on themselves
With that abandon that
Within my sight
You once gave me
Escape
From myself
And led me to promise
Life in your image
But I see now only the beauty
Of you
One step beyond my horizon

Forest

Idiosyncrasies amass terrified norms
Longing for pasts’ presents
With tears of enlightenments lost
Baggage unclaimed
From within flights of fanciful brokenness

Liquid imaginings metamorphose
Toward incipit dewdrops
Encapsulating mornings’ revelations
Of rebirth
While death waits

Wings unfolded
Preparing to extricate you
From unfinished sentences

Making thoughts complete
In their very shatterednesses
Left hanging on winds
Fluttering partially remembered flags
Of homelands once dreamed of

You walk between trees
No longer in the rows
Your mind expects
But dancing freely
In slowed emotions

Legs carry you without grounds’ touch
Between branches hung with moist leaves
Droplets microcosms of memories’ departed
Landing beneath your gaze
Feet feeling only wings of unexpected fluidity

Eyes deceive
While contacts once firm
Lose perceived solidity
In daydreams of postponed mortality

Foreseen

Hopes shiver within you
without expectation
but perhaps in fear of success
as failure comforts
in its solemn silence

Better live in moons’ tacit light
than risk the shock of mornings’
staggering revelation
that tomorrow comes not
before today’s engagement

Yet you look not to horizons
seeking enlightenment
or press vision toward walls
to find yourself
in minds’ simplified depths

Amid black dresses and
hidden behind beauties’
foregone conclusions of ineptitude
you seek predictable failure
for others

In your disengagement
you escape to safeties innumerable
in their concert
with friendships forged through
a connection of intoxicated familiarity

You know not thoughts of those you touch
beyond their spoken normalcies
and shared programmed losses
to penetrated insides
turned submissive in their predictability

No freedom to dismiss inaction
as busywork in service of unwelcome national identity

You are a good drunken girl

Lost to the needs of the moment

Self only in naming your next drink