When we were beautiful

In the roads, like the songs, swords forgive me for spewing them forth, our words.

Still the memories might not entertain. So tight, so tired, at the tip of a tongue that could balance no more blows. It is autumn as autumn is, rainbow menagerie of leaves, grasses and glass moments, windows I banged against, breathed against, on which I wrote another name.

There is a Bon Jon Jovi concert coming up, entitled “when we were beautiful.” How fitting for these days, this road back (home?). I have engaged, upset the time to avoid the temptation of reaching out, touching my house. Still, it is autumn I recall. The sculpted grounds and walks in woods, front porches that could contain nothing, not the need, not the winds.

I did not know the guaze that would grow around autumn’s trees, trap and sadden them by my yellow barn. I did not know to cook, but heated jars and wet my soul with full grape wine. I did not know that one foot forward would take me far across oceans and age, would unleash me from my auburn jungle of limbs. I did not know those knives would look back, lurch back at me, burst forth from my wool cocoons to flutter their fanatical eyes.

Of that autumn, I remember the cold of metal pipes, voices clinking inside of their bones—how I held my ear even there to sight a single truth. How I pursued pinker lips; how the bathtub could not warm me. How wild the weeping was, that no wish could release me—or even jangle my chains.

The swords

Then the lips, the swords remind me of the pirate in our home. So too the market will mark me, candycane scents and the touch of apples on my tongue. Then too will the ice split open, spill forward a snowy night we could not make it back on open roads. I will press my face to the glass windowpane, pained, see the golden feet of fairytale furniture and lost speckled poneys with sad eyes. I will sit across from you when you mourn in the midnight street diner. I will mourn alone.

And there will be the fields, there will be the bluest walls of all, the cozy nook built by your hands. I will curl in the corner of the attic, push back at the boxes that stifle our tears. I will climb on top of the cabinet, curl my legs to my chest, sip the sour morning coffee and miss you, though beside you, all those days.

Before, I will rock myself to sleep on the wicker porch chair, turn my back to the gorges where grown and barefooted,you were lost. I will sip tea alone from a dark green gourd, will savor even every wind.

Maybe, at dusk, I will cross the feathery bridge, a small branch you hold to my knee. Or I will twist and turn in pine green sheets. I will sip the heart off a coffee cup, will saunter roads home. Two for one specials will catch my eye, sour skittles and cans of soda sipped dry, sat on their heads.

Navy hatchbacks will move inside of my breath. I will lock the door to my passenger seat, taste olives off of counters. Madeline will blink at me me, a stranger that haunts. I will hear his crackled voice on the radio and the chords will shock me; the hills will have grown around me, the mission's cupbards empty and hurting again.

I will edge towards wineries and raspy nights. I will write. I will tie my hair in curls and slip on white. No matter what, when I keep walking, I will turn my head around.

Still, I cannot imagine those white, chartered streets. I cannot remember even my last step, that swallowed goodbye. Only the trinkets that danced on our shelves, only the sunsets that slapped back at my regret.

Where the wild things are

I feel akin to the small boy with pointed-ear pajamas and an imagination that cannot be caught or cuddled, left extinguished or breathless by day. There is nowhere else to go, but where the wild things are: an internal, in-exterminable expression of world eventful and alien, where kisses are blown instead of noses in sleeves.

And so I put on my footies and run.

I play with nostalgia, link back to, lick back at it—promise of storks and white, white nights to ride home. I see those nights as waves, peaked, broken—imagine my lanky arms, drowned in a moonlight I could not love (or turn my back to in later stages of life).

I play in tidepools, soft and hot from sun; corner stores where I could huddle and hum a name; I play on subways, where I imagine an eventuality at KaDeWe, to step out at Alexanderplatz and stock up on krusties, black licorice, yearning that still chokes my soul. I rock in those raw and rickety arms, so sour and still so sweet to touch.

I play on swingsets, churning my insides and the inside outs I whispered, now locked tightly (without keyhole), a place even my child eyes cannot peak inside of: even my voice cannot reach to tell. So many syllables, sounds I cannot speak. Creased guitars, a piglet farm, coveralls and crudettes only touched to my lips.

So the past, played and pleated, is presented in grand gowns and big mistakes. Those mirrors, mildly tilted, both a maze and a storm: a kiss of salt, of the waves, of the wounds.

Miss

I miss the world I torched with my (magic?) wand, so many mountains I promised to lay myself down between, when the nights bit hard and the winters were shouldered by better men. Sometimes, I seek out reminders; as if I relish in the wrenching, fill my nights with foreign, forgotten words that have, in their heaviness, the nest they grow around me, a way to bring me home, again, ask back the memories I laid beside flowers and filled wounds.

I miss, strangely, glass cups I could balance on my knees. I miss the pale green track suit that helped me to modernize, to blend in with dark haired beauties and so many shields from the sun. I miss the roads, cherry treats, ventilated cars, a burgeoning build up life to be mine.

It is gone and yet, sometimes I lie down beside it. Sometimes I caress its cheek as if, kissed once, loved enough, it will wake from this long and painful sleep. Sometimes, I lie beside it because the sorrow--sedentary now in most days of life--wants to remind me of who I was, those many years of making me right. And sometimes, it is only really guilt, as I know the crumbs swept up forcefully were taught by the life I did not choose; I feel guilty for the quilt I laid in, almost wicked in my greed.

And then I think of another life left behind, how jealous I am of the red bricked roofs and other, spoiled girls, who write their names. How close I came, inscribing mine not in ink, but blood, patterned mornings when I blamed the woods, I begged the stream to cool me, quickly home.

laughter

For some reason, my head is full of bells. Bells of laughter, and Kim's head thrown back over the quote 'the times they are a changin.' Teaching high schoolers makes me think of those times. Jealous, almost, of the proud and passionate prose through which they live their lives. I know it's the laughter, the summer roof and chicken fries--the laughter most of all by which he would want to be remembered. And I know that no one will ever make me laugh like that again; what a gift those gutteral gasps were, artfully intertwined in every one of our days. What a gift, as his child, both small and grown, to be always loved and allowed to laugh so loud.

you know

[somewhere i have never travelled] by e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near


your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose


or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending

This Years Love

I like to slip inside of songs, mostly when I am tired, or when torrid memories make their way back, pinch me in my sleep, sudden reminders of love--as loss--a lurid, breathing babe left behind. Photographs of youth are scattered on my nightstand, memorable moves between schools and styles of life, these make me look up in the middle of the night, not away; they invite in all that I shift my gaze from, inevitable arches, powdered peaks I cannot reinvent with words. It is both pure and pathetic, but love stands there, in my past, in my present, in my future in all of its forms; what I want is not to embrace it, but to enter back blindly, born into feathered arms.

I sit here, supposed to be working, or writing yet another collection of annual reports that somehow justify funding my scattered academic pursuits. But all that this year presents to me is clouded, or clouds, themselves, real but untouchable; present but impossible to climb inside of, to understand pragmatically, to incorporate as mine. I sit here and I write in code because real words, real explications are ugly and blind. All simplicity forgets the most important facts--the beast of ambiguity having made a home beside me, worse yet inside of me, an unfriendly fiend I cannot remove from my life, my skin.

Time moves in a muddled, mysterious way, and yet I remain, rock within the rocks of days I have lost, days when I could fully lend my heart. The heat, today, is a spring I rarely laugh upon, a flowering that should cater me in winds. Still no dressing for the wettest wound of all, still no sun that could bear its shadow, or free its soul.

Of course I miss my father. Now the words do not come any more, but shocks of pain that wake me, midnight breathing when I tell myself he is present, when I beg for some kind of ghost. I want to believe that the wings breaking the wind, I want to believe that thunder and sudden rain are bred in his name. Worst of all, I continue making deals, not with devils or with god, but within myself; all that I am prepared to lose to see him close, to inhale my other world against his chest, all that I will sacrifice for one day, or hour, for five minutes to bite his smokey breath. Maybe this is what stands between me and return to my racket of emotion; maybe this is why the whole world seems shallow, mild and shaded, rather than wild and alive as it did before. Righteous in missing my father, I am selfish in missing myself.

All I want is to write, to write and ache, invent and love in a way that seems far past to me; half of me ripped from my clutching arms. If I could write; and if I could be--for more than a moment--certain, I think the nights would pass in slumber, my bed would empty of black ice.