Incantatory, Your Steps

Incantatory were your steps
Cycled in rhythms of
Lamentation + celebration
Your comings + goings
Form the circumference of that circle
Giving shape to the reminder
Of a future reunion

There is no easy way to say goodbye
So sitting in silence I care for you
While you admire the sight of me
Dressed in yellow for the first time
A dim sun in my room's low, purple light.

Your body + my body
Is that of man and man
And that human craving that anchors us
To the floating frenzy of this world
And how long have a I thrashed!
Desperate to release the tether

Tattered + exhausted
I succumb to the day-to-day
Remembering fondly the night-to-night
Intimacies that saved us
From our selves
When the moonlight whispers
Loud as ice cracking under the weight of liquor

Drunk -- we fall into this!
I stumble into your second world
And you are elemental + longing
And I am elemental + longing

Skeptical I wonder: Is the bed a grave or a cradle?
Together we are figuring it out
Figuring it all out

Amber

A family moves towards reconciliation
Scrubs the blood off the kitchen floor

Evidence of the ways they were made
To raise their children

A brutal theater reproduced
Silence and sound become twin barrels of the same gun

All things in their right place
My childhood home is a war museum

See how all my subterfuge
Is laid bare at my feet

The boy, hidden -- a spy in his own home
These signs I learned to interpret to protect him

My grandmother's church hat-- a threat
My grandfather's blood pressure -- a premonition

My sister's bratty ways -- a nuisance
My mother's entire life -- a warning

My father's absence -- a void
My own body -- a reaction

I've been queer in a way that's failed me
I've been terrified of my own family

A family moves towards reconciliation
Scrubs the blood off the kitchen floor

Evidence of the ways they were made
To raise their children

A brutal theatre reproduced
Silence and sound become twin barrels of the same gun

All things in their right place
My childhood home is a war museum

See how all my subterfuge
Is laid bare at my feet

And yet every card they bought me kept
Every birthday and graduation remembered

Celebrated in memory's amber
That fragrant resin resonating through time

These small, pleasant reminders
Pulling me back from margin back to center

Beach Haikus #1-9

Wrapped up in sea breeze
Pelicans triangulate
The sky dreams in blue

Waves crest, break on land
The sea and sand mingle here
Elementals talk

The ocean contains
Each and every one of us
Past, present, future

Throwing yourself in
At the mercy of the waves
The thrill of return!

We live in the wake
Submit to the undertow
Hear slaves whispering?

Beach-time isolates
Whirlpools thrash -- salt in vortex
Lungs remember breath

Love transcends decades
It lingers bright as sunburn
Blushing, enduring

Laid out on the beach
Music drifts through sunlit air
Sun kisses body

Fly in buttermilk
You clash with your surroundings
Who started this fight?

Microdream: Grief

Each and every thing

I can pluck from my mouth

From day-to-day

Feathers

Ashes

Songs

Anything that drifts

Lazily in the air

And flutters onto the ground

To alight in the crucible

Transformed by its longing

Marked by the sounds of love

That has nowhere to go

Dry January/Ex-Dream

The first, second, and third days tremble through the week

Stumbling and nascent, their legs shaking off the weight of entering the world

Anew

Senses sharpen like knives on the whetstone

Appetite and thirst shift between stagnation and craving

How odd to think of you now…

On the fourth and fifth day my stomach

Sends me quaking into the kitchen with appetite and thirst

Renewed

I toss together kale, spinach, arugula, and olives dressed with tahini and garlic

When I first met you

You were dressed in bourbon and ginger

The night flushed in your cheeks and eclipsed your demeanor

Earth’s shadow pours blood over the moon

The sixth and seventh days convince me

Of my power over the urge

I button up my shirt, slip into oversized slacks

Crank up the car and it sputters with the weight of age and rust and moisture

Before ambling through the driveway, scraping past the shoulders of bushes

Their waxy leaves winking in the winter morning light

When I first met you

I noticed your eyes were the color of hazel

They danced between green and cold

The same way the sunlight does, bouncing from leaf to leaf

On tree to tree

How odd to think of you now

As all my poisons are dispelled from my body