Birchwood

She sips herself dry

Of the warning.

Her breath

Is beating

Like foghorn.

If she gasps

She relapses in fault;

The schoolteacher memory

Can break her.

But he chooses her

As his plaything.

Mental monogamy.

A winter she cannot misplace.

She never found

Her glove.

He keeps the teacup he offered her

In his top dresser drawer:

Her bright pink lipstick has caked,

And she wears darker shades

In the skin she now rents.

She learned three things

That semester:

Conviction,

And the yearning to fly.

Sincerely

You are your signature,

Though you claim to be the page.

Your wrists are white

And bumpy;

Your palms feel balmy

And smell mangled.

I reduce you

Like a misguided rectangle

Into the square it was meant

To be.

But you are not evil.

The horns in pictures of you

Are drawn.

For that, I do not

Apologize.

I do ask for understanding.

At sixteen

I reported my palms missing.

My fists hid them rather well.

My eyes

Never

Looked down.

An open sore on my ribcage,

Now a gorgeous story

Reminded me

That to leave you

Was to know you.

I cannot believe

It took two cancers;

One I could feel,

One seen retroactively

To love you again.

With each overturned chair,

The contemplated swan-dive

To leave my unmarked body,

The hours of head crown

To the inside of a locker,

I cursed your name

As a bomb.

I wish you were your signature.

I do wish you were

Your signature.

Perhaps you will find this

Cruel

When you inevitably read it.

When you see your blood

Pumping through the words.

If this is the case,

Hold your breath.

Kill them

As they can only be killed:

In silence.

If you find these words

An attack

And see them stand erect

As your heart

Beats

Faster,

Then you are not your signature.

You are the page.

Surrender

On the night that you leave,

We hug.

I tug so hard

That my right arm,

Stronger than my thigh,

Severs at the shoulder.

The stump bleeds salt.

It remembers your name.

Your mother is watching,

Her back turned

Without acting a shroud.

I imagine she clenches a fist:

Her teeth.

The wound does

Not acknowledge itself. It is

A lady. It will not

Beg.

But, if you loosen your grip,

You will wreck me.

The blood will find itself

Difficult to plateau. To cake.

To remember its name.

It will try to drown

The tear-soaked carpet.

You will spend years

Hovering with mop bucket

And fine-toothed comb.

Without your mother.

One time,

Perhaps all at once

(I can not remember),

You set my arteries on fire.

You liked the sound of

My heart.

But you liked racing it more.

And you wanted to ignite my life,

Waterless.

You could have scabbed my forehead

With your careless first kiss.

Its teeth at the lip

Of regret's precipice.

You are not a box filled

With sanity.

You are just a boy

Empty of his years,

Reeking of righteousness.

In a way that can only come

From faking it.

The mother was wet.

Her pattern flossed giant men

With their faces down.

Sunset

Every time I turn transatlantic

I try to make sure I fly eastward

Getting as far away from California

As I can

Because flying over Inglewood

Would put me only thousands of feet

Above Ray Charles’ body

And if his ghost is soaring as high

As I think it is

As high

As a piano

Injected with helium

Coercing through its redwood

I would meet him in the cabin

Of that Boeing 747

You see

Ray holds everything I am not

Behind those ray-bans of his

The truth to the secret I cannot tell the world

His retina scribes a test

Pushing poets to their best

And throwing failures out

Like last weeks top billboard hit

All Ray would ask me

Is “What is a sunset”

And aside from some muggy

Water-stained rendition of a faulty textbook

I am not sure I could explain it to him

But with a smile

Like a quarter-crescent moon

He would encourage me with his silence

As I would stand there

Watching my reflection dance in the opals

Begging me like Oliver for an answer

And I would be left with

All the metaphors maintained

By a matchbook notepad

And all the moments I never had

I’d say

I guess it sort of looks

How an orgasm feels

But only at the base

And only if you subtract the metallic taste

And the clouds are every non-biological

Maternal figure you ever let hold you.

The sky is still there

Like the baseline in a Guns N’ Roses song

Only far fewer people

Throw their tube tops to manifested men

To it’s rhythm

And if you catch it at just the right moment

It’s the color of that time

You asked your mom in the checkout line

For a Twix bar

And she promised it with her next paycheck

And a hand on your shoulder

And there are rays

Ironically

Which shoot out from the base like

How it would feel to hold the hand

Of the bandana’d vagabond on the train.

Only the sunset will let go before you do

And if you see it

Or don’t see it

With someone who can see it

Or not see it

For everything it is to you

The sunset is a one-time sun-roof

Set in the shape of god’s hand

Binding you two

Until seagulls go home

To read their baby seagulls

Bedtime stories about a man named

Jonathan Livingston

And Ray and I would lay down

With an enthusiasm

Held between my right palm

And his left

In the middle of an airplane cabin

Wondering which of us was blind

That damned birthday just kept making you cringe. Your mother wondered if you would ever notice your freedom, but you insisted upon your faction shackles. If you blink, you lose the moment. If you yawn, it will be obsessed with your reluctance. Blow out those candles, familiar brother. You are unjustifiably wanton, and tonight cannot beg your admittance. Wreck the blockade of these years. Free your spirit as a luxury.

Wyoming

This wind

Will melt you

If you allow it.

Winter was our refuge

From the lonely fist of man.

You,

Fence-bound and bleeding

I,

Unaware of you

Until too late.

Why did they take your voice?

Rip it

From behind your tongue

With their miles?

With their sunken brows.

And how?

You are famous.

And nobody

Is happy about that.