Frost

timeless for half an hour
you dream of springtime
but outside this fall is giving in
its reins to colder days
and you of all people 

you know what it is like to hibernate alone.

Moonshine

Should we be strangers still

By moonlight

I will learn to peel your words

Before I feel them seep

Inside my veins,

Before I let your eyes coerce me,

Before I trust your ears to catch me,

Before I know your arms too dearly.

You, too, are a wonder

To me some nights

When with my little hands

I break this moon into a thousand sighs.

I want to know this light.

Whether it crumbles like roses,

Whether it hangs from the silence,

Whether it lives in a cavern of doubts.

And when it flakes, whether it coats us both in stardust

Till in the dark, we've no more moon
For empty sighs to rustle in our bones.

Gratitude

Although these arms did hold you once,

Fed you night-time from a spoon,

Wrapped your head in hopeful wonder -

There will come a day when all your sometime thanks

Will be disdainful greed

Or you might push away

These arms when they still try

Smothering your fears
With love you can never repay.

The Devoted One

You hope someone else has walked in your shadows,

Has picked up crumbles of your many lives

With lovely, trembling hands

Only to fold them, small as secrets,

Into the pockets of a rusting heart.

That same someone has written down the song

Of your soft grieving

And named it for your calmly storming eyes.

That someone may not wait for you forever

While you defy yourself by searching farther still

Into the depths of hope and great despair
(Your shadows feel familiar there)

The Victor

You always win at checkers

Always first in cards

Always the king of scrabble

You deftly unscramble

The muddle inside my heart

While I pull the wrong suit

And gratefully root myself

Into your arms and ask you

Without ever asking you aloud

To just keep buzzing your voice

Against my skin.

You’ve always been the first to finish puzzles,

The last to let the towers fall.

You are a prodigy at bingo

And you’ve always handled victory well.

But when I ask you to convince me

That this is not a flaw,

It’s just a square that takes me two steps back,

It’s just a snake,

It’s just a jail card,

You don’t know what to tell me.

You only ever land on ladders and

You only ever skip through “GO”.

Smoke and Mirrors

If I am beautiful, then it is smoke and mirrors.

On level footing I may disappear

And you will never find me,

Never in ten thousand years.

Not here, not where the light

Of morning softness breaks

The cover of my long-drawn face,

Not where the sleepy and still silent

Art of rising peels the blanket off my studied grace.

I do not know what dreams my eyes might show

When I have not yet cleansed them of their candour.

The woman who awakes beside you is too much of me

That you might break upon her insolent affection.

If I am beautiful, then it is of the study

I have so carefully embraced

And bled into my smile, my footing,

And the way I breathe your name.

If I am beautiful then it is my chef d’oeuvre,

My great illusive act.

You cannot know its secret.

You cannot ever know how deep I’ve gone

Into this hapless helpless

Desolate defenseless

Ugly

Love for you.

My mirrors have begun to shatter

And if you call for me your care will cut

Itself upon my broken voice.

I cannot carry kindness.

It is hard enough

Trying to hold back the smoke.

Aiming for the callouses of the earth

Some nights the air turns brutal

And all you can see are planes

Butter-winged in between the sheathes of wind

Aiming for the callouses of the earth

And you never really thought you’d be the kind

To make a death threat, but right now you’re dying

To kill something or other as though life

Were just the little light atop a birthday candle

Or some medal you can take away.