09.09.025-26.10.025 Invitation (Tin Mirror)

What a wonderful thing:

enough time face-to-face

to know the curves of your eyes.

Enough space: vocal folds vibrating diatomic air

to cochlear-hair receptors;

communicating how, when, where, why.

More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you

across a desk, across years.

It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.

I can feel like a mess most of the time.

I did not, that day (and still,

I worry I seemed that way) with you.

I worry too much.

I don’t worry enough.

I worry about the wrong things.

I don’t want to let the world in;

I don’t want to invite the future,

in all of its possibility.

I want you to be my world

in this present moment, solely;

I only want to know what is.

Let us take off our shoes;

walk into the woods; breathe in

evergreen; hear the willows’ weepings.

Please don’t leave so soon.

Don’t bolt, don’t wither

if I grow sad, if I anger—

those feelings will never be rooted in you.

Please linger, here: petrichor-wreathed;

warm-milkweed green.

To someday see our faces

florecientes, adjacent—

tangent in a tin mirror—

darling, that would be a dream.

I do not want to wake.

Please pause, please stay;

I have a soft spot waiting.

08.11.025 “Don’t Be Needy”

When you ask me how I am doing,

you are asking me to lie. 

You die for a relationship

with a pocketed picture of me at age ten;

forced smile, teeth bared

(because it’s normal, because

if I am normal

then we will all be okay, I’d say).

A twenty-six-year-old image,

sun-scorched and dog-eared,

clutched in digits victim

to muscle wasting:

white-hot grip beginning

when I, as I am now,

began to begin; ischemia letting

no new blood in.

The mind is not a muscle.

Isometrics bring no new tone—

only atrophy. Nothing more.

A white-knuckled mind will not let me go.

Again:

who am

I

to Be?

(You mistakenly/mindlessly

gave me back a scarf I made

for you, years ago.

It will now go to someone in need.)