Mother of darkness

I raise my voice at you
To you, really, mostly

You creep over the horizon after I've stopped looking
and make me feel tired. Forgotten.

I can't start you
I can't stop you
But that never keeps me from trying

When I was younger, at school, you gave me life
The night was magical, lay before me and opened up
Gave me a beginning in the end
and anything was possible.

Now, you only hold the promise of one hundred more tomorrows

Another night, when we splinter behind closed doors and wait for it to be over
only to start another, all over again

I, too, love the dawn.
But wish there was still a time when night was more exciting than the day.
When night was the section that held me. Loved me. And gave me life again.

the kind that frees you

wilderness
a woman's brown eyes, a woman
an illegal thought, a want
as deep as rust can go.

how far can it go, just a thought
looking to give birth
to the rest of my life, my real life
the one imagined, looking at women
when they were not looking at me.
that much wild
looking back would burn,
i would go blind.

for that certainty, I would dream
of being destroyed, ripped open
by an anonymous her.

a mushroom, my miserable mistakenness.
i could have become the kind
that ruptures quietly, a well-mannered ruin.

Wilderness, inevitable
you only choose which
the kind that frees you,
or the kind that does not.

i chose my love's brown eyes,
a love that coats me, has helped me
come out of a cold dream
that would eat me alive,
shame's deep corrosion.

Black Friday

Dishing out dollar bills
is not the way to healing

stockpile success in closets and drawers
drown the sickness you're feeling

in boxes, in things, instead
stack them high like bricks

until the faintest of breezes blows by
a house is made of matchsticks

into this land I sink myself
pouring in every drop of faith that I've got

the runoff is soiled, polluted
unable to soak it in, it pours out over the top

ruin
all for a day

poem start

Shadows insert themselves

thin sheets of carbon between layers

of intention, good clean plans.

Each letter strikes and leaves behind

a dark outline, a residue

recorded.

Dust on the fingers

incidental contact with the least expected, 

bodies come away marked

by a brush, not lightly brushed off.

There is no coming back, not

in the same way, never spotless again.

The neighbor who fell, whose eyes

went somewhere else entirely, who heard

me calling him back.

There was that time I called myself back.

An empty page, the clean white everything else

compromised.