On the Slant

You are the thing,

Between

The shadow and the soul—

The slant.

The shift in the time, the traverse down the hallway.

The wood slats soft shuddering under socked feet.

Where were you when I was seventeen?

Wandering about an orchard in Wisconsin day dreaming New York in my head.

Already casting about for your magic.

(I found it once in a whirl of LSD when I was seventeen and he was Donovan and the kiss was falling into a black hole of velvet)

The supposition of being in time, the same time, the place within the slant, the whisper, the girl in the doorway between apple and end.

In your arms I am.

Everywhere.

Everything.

Every bird in the murmuration against the sunset sky, the levee, the high grass, the wild white egrets in a cluster on their own private island in a cloud cake divination of god.

You in the willow

The magic.

A solace, that sunset, atop a boat, serenaded by a child’s toy ukulele.

Smitten.

You said.

I must admit, I am smitten.

And then there were your eyes that day, that day that I shied away, skittered sideway into some domesticated scene with an old man, a cat drinking skim milk from a cracked yellow china saucer, desiccated like the soft smoky paws of Eliot’s sky above the stove pipes in London town.

Your

Eyes, soft, golden brown, glowing.

Have eyes ever glowed so at me?

I think not.

Love,

Love,

Love,

You sang out to me, my heart swelled and battered at my breast and the cold in the delta chafed my fingers and thread its way into my heart.

Knowing that I would hurt you.

I broke the magic.

I am still crying over it.

Aloft in a plane, high above the world, scattered in the clouds and pink lemonade bubble gum of my lust/love/magic/show/flash/boom/applause/carnival—

A cacophony.

Mixed impressions, mixed times, moments conflate and conspire.

I can feel the floor under my feet, but it is illusion, the hum of sky engines with nothing below but the pummel of ground, through which I would fall, like so many flat earthed scions, teetered and tilted off the edge of the world into the abyss.

And in your arms now.

Now, now, now, rent with desire and flush faced with love I beseech you, come back my beautiful boy heart, look upon me again, eyes wide and wondering, awed in the gloaming grey.

I will never leave again.

I cleave only to the edge of time in the long fairy grass of the orchard where the slender-stemmed violets grew in the shade of the Cortland tree.

Where I walked barefoot dreaming the dreams poets forget in the long hallways of tenement walk ups in Chelsea, in New York, in the pitching gloom of a dark club, in the gum ball machine dispensing cocaine and long sea song see saw wandering back and forth the invisible lands between you and I.

You and I.

You and I.

On a tiny island in the heart of a wild bird preserve at the edge of the wilderness of men and madness where poetry still floats in the air and thrums soft and wild in the fingers of your hands on the tiny neck of the little ukulele.

Sing me your song magic man,

I am all ears.

I am all yours.

I await you.

In between the duende and the soul on a slant tethered to the moon.

Moonlight in the Palms

Mischievousness on my mind.

Make out and marauding.

Not that I have made out in a minute.

I miss kisses.

I was seeing someone, oh so briefly, before I left for Burning Man and had playa plans that completely crashed and burned.

In a rather heartbreaking way, but with honest awareness of needing something different then what was there.

Yet.

For just a moment there was the magic of what could come.

Sometimes.

Quite often, which led me to the moonlight in the palms, literally as I sat on my couch having a late dinner–chicken apple sausage, brown baby bell mushrooms and spinach omelet with good butter and sharp cheddar, guacamole, sour cream, and salsa with a nice crunchy romaine and veg salad with homemade dressing.

(oh lala I do like an omelet and salad for dinner sometimes, feels so French, though I dare say a French person would look a little aghast at all the things I throw on the plate)

The moon is glinting off the palms and reminded me of the moonrise I saw in the delta on Saturday when I went out to secure my trailer and stage her for an upcoming adventure and I stayed way past the time I was going to stay, meeting people, watching feral children chase each other in the grass and the whoops and hollers of little ones in true free play.

Met dogs and ladies and lads and got invited to “docktails” in the marina and watched the sunset and listened to stories and had this thinness of the skin of the universe just shift and shimmer a touch.

A tiny spangle of light from another dimension of story telling and landscape of wild in heart space happened.

A loosening of time.

A kind of blending between here and there.

What is.

What was.

What is to come.

The slipstream of time and the wobble of the world.

A kind of dance of magic and time bending that I don’t often feel in the hustle bustle, the gritty grinding and the work demands of life.

I know it is there.

I live too close to it.

And at this time of year, maybe it is the approach of the witching hour.

Though I am more in the land of fey then the land of witches, I can play a good witch on tv, but the fairies have always had more of me than anything else.

I know I have fey in my blood.

My therapist.

MY THERAPIST.

Mind you.

Said recently, well, you know Carmen, you are psychic.

With a straight face.

More on that later.

But he is not wrong, I sense things a foot as I am not always in this world but often astride another slip of time, meandering between the two, sometimes lost and confused and bewildered in the world where I am so often alone.

Surrounded by people, but aching to be seen.

And not seen by the pretty boys at the club.

Goodness he was a delicious sight Folsom weekend when I found myself in a tiger print catsuit out dancing at the Foundry.

He wanted to hear about my tattoos.

He asked to buy me a drink.

“Club soda with lime, I don’t drink.”

He looked at me, “there’s a story there, but tell me about your tattoos, I bet you have lots of stories.”

Sure, young one with the beautiful dark hair who stood a head and shoulders above me.

I could see you tousled in my bed, albeit, I would likely kick you out before letting you sleep with me and my mouth guard and my sleep mask and my old skin which looks beautiful under club light, but wrinkles quickly with laughter and morning light.

“Pick one,” I said, “and I’ll tell you the story while we wait for our drinks, club soda with lime.”

“That one,” he pointed, nearly touching my chest plate tattoo, right below my sternum.

“Ah,” I thought, he won’t like the story, but that is not my problem.

“This is for the man who was my soul mate with whom I had a horrible heartbreak with when he wouldn’t allow himself to be with me and I broke up with him, I was devastated and could not stand the pain, so I got a tattoo of the Tiffany heart necklace he had given me on my chest to feel some other kind of pain than what was in my heart.”

He looked like I had stabbed him.

“I don’t like that story,” he said.

Then a friend transmorgrified from the crowd.

And I disappeared to leave the pretty boy at the bar and go dance it out.

Sometimes I transmorgrify by dancing.

Other times through storytelling.

Or just by witnessing the thinness, the skein stretched to see through from here to there.

I did, actually get that experience at Burning Man, with a man, a friend, who sheltered in place with me in my trailer during the worst storm I had experienced in over a decade at the burn.

We sat and told stories about ourselves and I had faint glimmers of, something is here, but he won’t cross over.

He even sat on my bed at one point and I rubbed his feet.

He took a set of jackalope ears off the wall of my trailer and put them on his head, he became a faun, not a horned jackrabbit, the ears vanished in the twilight of the space and all I saw were the horns, the wild daisies in his hair, the shimmer of a faun, a mythological creature, not a goat, but a faun, and I knew, I could seduce you, but I won’t because part of you was pulled forward that you don’t know exists in you.

And it wasn’t my place to do that.

I have magic.

But not a desire to manipulate with it.

So.

When someone else sees the magic in me, I am bewitched myself.

I sense that in the air.

In the moonlight in the palm trees.

In the beat of house music on my speaker.

In my blood.

There is something a foot.

The last kisses of summer.

The heat of the sun on my skin and then the shiver of cold air that forebodes autumn.

All Hallow’s Eve.

More magic and mischief.

But not quite the fairy that I am.

Often mistaken for a witch.

Feykind.

I am neither here.

Nor there.

But waiting in between the shadows and slant, to be kissed.

Kissed.

Into being.

Conflict

Is the relationship asking to deepen, the pastor said from her pulpit at the Universalist Unitarian church.

I didn’t catch much more of the service because I was drowning in old religious trauma.

Dissociated.

Disoriented.

Collapsed.

Openly crying.

Eyes closed.

Tears streaming down my face.

I did not even realize that I had childhood religious trauma.

But there it was, on full display, in this church in Oakland that my ex had taken me to.

I had a lot of reservations about going and I can articulate many of them, but that if for another time.

The reason I am thinking of this particular sentence is that I have adopted it as an intervention tool with couples who are in conflict but afraid of talking about it.

Also, Esther Perel, who I have trained with, talks a great deal about how conflict avoidant we are as a society and the harm that it does to us.

I used the phrase tonight with a couple in deep conflict and extreme fear of walking into it.

And.

Lo.

There was a repair.

I am so grateful for getting to be a therapist.

I watched the couple move from being at either end of the couch at the beginning of the session to being tearfully in each others’ arms by the end of session.

There were a lot more interventions aside from that one, but that’s where it started, by walking into the conflict instead of avoiding it.

I am a very good therapist.

I am not always a very good partner.

But I am also human.

It is so very easy to see it from the other side of the room, or couch, if you may.

I couldn’t see it so clearly with my ex.

It hurts that I couldn’t always get out of my own painful past and shame with him in our dynamic.

My therapist was like, you got shamed, you shamed him, you both kept trying to talk to the other person and you only kept triggering each other.

I wish I had been able to pause.

God.

I wish I had.

But if wishes were horses beggars would ride.

And I would have a stable full of prancing ponies right about now.

It’s been such a wild ride.

Not comfortable.

Uncomfortable as fuck.

But I’m still on the ride.

Today’s ride is more about anger than it is about tears.

Yesterday I had my first, almost, so close, nearly, day without crying.

I made it to bed.

I knelt down, said grace, prayed for direction and guidance and had a picture of my ex float up behind my eyes that nearly floored me.

I was not expecting it and the tears came immediately.

Well, god damn it.

I thought I was going to make it through one day without crying.

But no.

I found myself today not so much sad but mad.

Mad at him for taking down his relationship status on Facebook before talking to me, days before talking to me, days of ugly anticipation.

Mad at him for being at his art studio in Potrero Hill, being in San Francisco when he lives across the Bay, the Saturday prior to this last, when he broke up with me in the evening, from Oakland.

Dude.

Why?

What the fucking hell?

Come over to my house.

Why am I seeing you post on Instagram about being at the studio and you won’t get in your car, drive over to my house, see me in person and do the deal face to face.

I suppose I will never know why.

Why is not a spiritual question.

But fuck, it rankled.

Rankled is not the right word.

It was like getting knifed in the heart.

It hurt so badly to see that.

I envisioned driving my car over and demanding, what the fuck?

Talk to me please.

Please, baby, please talk to me.

But I had never been over to his studio, I just know it’s in Potrero Hill, oh, I have a sneaking suspicion I could figure it out, there are only so many, but I’m not a fucking stalker.

I felt a moment of anger tonight too, saying those words to the couple in distress in front of me without having had the oppportuinity to deepen the relationship with him.

Fight for the relationship.

He gets the right to do whatever he wants, he decided to withdraw, he has his reasons.

“I don’t have time for you.”

But you have time to post to Instagram.

ARGHHHHHHH.

Anyway.

The anger is also a path forward, a light, a fire under my fucking ass.

I have been writing.

I have been reaching out.

And I have had people reach out to me over and over and over again.

Unexpectedly.

People I had no clue were concerned.

Messages on Instagram, Facebook, text messages, phone calls.

One friend even sent me a meme today via text that he made from my blog including a fake algorithm of me being offered “singles over 70” ads.

Motherfucker I am only 51.

And I dance like I’m 35.

Anyway.

I feel seen and loved.

Not necessarily loved by the man I want to love me.

Hmmm.

That’s not fair.

He did love me.

He just doesn’t have the time to commit to the relationship that it needs.

I think it’s the last that is unfair.

(If life was fair I would be dead)

He didn’t try.

(And maybe that’s unfair too, he just didn’t try with me in the way I wanted)

And that fucking hurts and makes me angry too.

I am worth the time.

Anyway.

I can’t convince him, or I would have already.

I have pretty much left him alone.

I will admit I have continued to leave him unblocked on Gmail, some small hopes that he will reach out and work towards repair, but the longer there is silence the more smashed that fantasy becomes.

One fantasy that has finally left is him being on my bed when I get home from the office.

He still has my keys.

I wonder if he is going to return them, I’ll come home one day with an anonymous envelope pushed through the mail slot, or if they’ve just been tossed in the recycling bin behind his house.

Enough repeated unlocking of the door to see my empty apartment, well, the cats are here, but empty of him, has quashed that fantasy.

I unblocked him on social too.

Maybe he’ll reach out there, he’s comfortable on it, uses it a lot.

Maybe….

Staying off that shit though, I can’t imagine seeing his handsome face, it would hurt too much.

I know this because I did look momentarily to still see some pictures of the two of us on his social.

It broke me all over again.

And.

Gave me what I now think is false hope, if he’s still got photos of us on his page maybe there’s a chance.

Anyway.

I expect that will change and I don’t know that I can stand to see that.

I may still go back and block him on social to avoid that pain.

But so far, the blog has given me the platform to process and process and process.

And the anger, like I said a moment ago has fueled the fire.

It has also fueled the fire for other writing projects.

I finally went through the steps to secure the right photographer for my tattoo book project and I am so fucking excited for it.

I have mapped out things I need to do before I connect with the photographer who is coming up from Los Angeles to work with me.

I am beyond excited to collaborate.

He is someone I know from my earliest sobriety.

I love and admire his work.

I cannot wait.

We will be doing the photo shoot the third weekend in March.

In the meantime I will be formatting the book and integrating the photos I do like from the previous photographer I worked will.

I will also be doing as much freaking self-care as I can.

I have been busy breathing and staying connected to people.

Breathing is work, especially when the pain was so bad I couldn’t draw breath without folding over and collapsing.

I have shared and cried and breathed and went grocery shopping and done food prep and written volumes in my journal, I have gone out dancing and will go out again in a couple of weeks.

I am listening to music that has no affiliation with our relationship and dancing in my kitchen in the meantime.

Anger is a part of grief.

And I know that at some point it will fade.

It will soften and I will accept and move gently forward into whatever unknown landscape there is in front of me.

I will forgive myself and him.

I will not shame myself for being messy, most of the time, and I will do my therapy work—with my clients and with myself.

I have to say my therapist being away has been really hard, but I have not come completely unhinged because of the sweet love and support I have had from my community.

And the anger is a little less now too.

Thank God for writing.

It is saving my fucking life.

So much so.

Thank God for the words, which are their own reflection love for me.

My heart needed so to process.

Here, now, in this way, I will show up for myself.

And.

Give myself the time he could not give to me.

Love Language

Love is the finger pointing at the moon.

Love is an action, you said in the kitchen, face inscrutable.

Ask me what actions, I could tell many.

“Petals on a wet, black bough,” you said.

The action of speaking into the corners of my heart, the music in the kitchen, the knowing, the knowing now, that you would read of my French adventures while I was walking through the night of the deserted Montmartre.

Paris meanders.

The dark, the cold, the fear, the belle pomme de boscop in the market, the smell of chestnuts in the Metro.

Harrowed days, wet, cold feet, in Paris, grey Paris, painful Paris.

Paris without you.

Alone.

Actions taken though.

Writing every day.

Photographs.

Amelie soundtrack in my head, but speeded up and laced with electronic beats, watching the tracks criss cross the yards through the windows fleeing past on Metro line 2.

Spoken word at the Le Chat Noir.

Men fighting on the train.

Pickpockets.

Romani children with dark eyes and thick, caterpillar eyelashes, red patched cheeks and cupid bow lips.

You stole my heart and put it in your pocket.

I’m not asking for it back.

In the morning, wrapped around you as the blush of day descends upon us.

In the space between alarm clocks and the awakening moment, my nose in your neck, your hand on my shoulder, all time, compressed upon me.

All time that was.

All time that is to become.

The soft, worn, used Camus book.

Summer in Algiers.

The colors, the water, the press of of literature in my eyes, lines singe my brain, I’m not a girl that misses much, sitting at the formica table in your desk chair.

(remember when you used to covet retro formica kitchen tables)

What do you need?

I need you, you said, so I crawled up into your bed.

Watching you.

Enigmatic you.

When you smile easy and fast.

When you smile to show me that you are paying attention.

Different the two.

The language that points to love.

The love language of acts, contritions, absolutions.

The mirror under my footsteps.

The reflection of you writing in a cafe watching me sitting in the window nook–mesmerized, the passerby clouds, the daydreams.

Your hands on the keyboard.

My hands.

You are writing somewhere while I write another where and the words breast against one another, what a day, what a day, oh, what a day.

When you grabbed me by the shoulders, said my name, tears welled up in your eyes.

Did you feel the tears?

The look in your eyes.

Love is an action.

The pause between my name.

And.

“I love you.”

The comma that made it all the more profound.

Love is the finger pointing to the moon, the pillow of my heart, the soft soul shine of you.

So pretty this.

You.

Moon.

Love.

Thinking about you

Thinking about things I have told you.

Thinking about things I have not yet told you.

Thinking about what you have said and not said to me.

Thinking about the dappled light through the tree leaves just before the summer solstice.

Jazz, sweet/soft like flotsam and jetsam in the air of my kitchen.

A skipped beat as the old speaker filled with sand from Ocean Beach, a gift from a family of yore, crackles in and out.

The sound.

The sound of heart thunder and waves crash and the fall of memory upon memory upon that same shore and others.

The scatter of leaves, maple, I think, birch, elm, through the Memorial Union terrace, fall fast fleeing into the sanctity of winter and the poems that I read in the middle row, third back, under the thin frame of Serena Pondrom pacing in front of the class reading Eliot to me.

Really.

It was always and only, just to me.

There were no others in the class, despite the seats that filled and drifted, the students that came and went, speaking not of Michelangelo or of fog like cats that wrap themselves around the eaves.

Fog.

Like San Francisco.

The mewling fog that Karl’s its way through the night and causes me to turn to the heater in the living room and make room for spoons and tea and the scattering of thoughts that drift down the hallways of time.

I filled a second blue book with everything I have since forgotten of the rose garden, the quartets, the time that was always now.

You send me a poem in another man’s voice and I am beguiled back to that space, that hallway, that classroom buried in the interior of the building that housed classical music and blues music and white men who taught me about the suffering of black men and made money on text books that we have since sold back to buy packs of Camel cigarettes and double vanilla lattes at Espresso Royale, the one on the bottom of State Street where I would loiter outside of pinball halls and skip classes and day dream.

And I state to you, in this space, so far away, yet so collapsed in.

That I knew then what I knew not now and though I could not fathom the journey, I can see all along.

All along.

That you were there in the whisper of the poems just waiting to put your hands in my hair and shudder my name in your mouth in the dark of the night while the wind whickered in and out of the fig tree under a moon sprayed with fog and the promises made to me long ago.

Just there.

At the edge of the near frozen lake.

At the beginning of my time within time.

In the footfalls down the hall at the base of the hill underneath it all.

You were there.

Just like the mermaids were.

Singing each to each.

Time to write

There comes a time to write.

Not the time to write that I take for myself, the daily journal, the morning pages, that fill notebook after notebook, after notebook.

I have a stockpile of bins in my office closet.

I slowly fill a notebook and then quietly transport it to my office, place it in a file box, or an old leftover plastic bin retired from Burning Man.

I look at them and reflect on the past 18 years that I have been assiduously putting pen to paper.

I wonder what to do with them.

They are precious.

And they are markers of passing time.

And they are just words.

Words that help me process the world that I walk through.

Words that, to few others mean very little.

They are both everything and nothing.

I could go to the office and make a few trips up and down the steps and load the boxes up in the back of my car, drive out to Ocean Beach, find a fire pit, and have myself a little bonfire (of vanity) of my words and I would be ok with that.

I am attached and detached to both the idea of keeping the notebooks and letting them all go in a whoosh of flames.

I don’t have anyone to leave those words to.

Perhaps to my younger self, see here, girl, look what you have wrought.

I reflect on this as I think about this past week and the travel that I took.

I was in Florida.

First to see my mother and make an amends for having to cancel a trip over Thanksgiving.

I saw her for Mother’s Day.

Made good on being a daughter.

Traveled across the country to a land that seems so far away and different to me than San Francisco.

Then I met my beau in Miami.

And no.

I won’t be writing about him.

I long to in some ways, there is much to process, but that goes in the notebooks.

That is for my eyes, my heart only.

Suffice to say I was not alone in Miami and what I did and felt and saw was so vastly different than the last time I was in Miami, that it stirred within me the urge to write my blog today.

Aside.

I wonder about taking this elsewhere, this blog.

Am I loyal to the platform?

Is it just a historical document, my millions of words, my thousands of blog, my endless ego, that keeps me here?

I don’t often write, as I used to, once a day, every day.

A kind of hiding in plain sight I think.

A way to be seen and of the world, but also away from the world, away from socializing, dating, going out, making friends.

The blog has been a protector, a glimpse into my life, my psyche, who I am, the places I have gone, the things I have seen, felt, touched, heard–a way of mirroring who I am and also, frankly, not who I am.

This is just a part of me.

Not the biggest part of me either.

It is me.

And.

It is not me.

I don’t know exactly how to formulate it, how to describe it, the words they come out of my head, they flow through my fingers, I am just dictating my thoughts as they move around my brain.

This is not me in entirety, it’s a thread, a gossamer, a glowing line of words that meander around some segment of my brain.

I just follow the trail, like a silver snail, and pick up the words and put them here.

I know it is me.

It is not me.

Something else.

Something divine.

Something that has its way with me, through me, in me.

There is more me than this me.

Like all the levels of death, the small deaths, the ego deaths, the different manifestations of death, le petit mort.

A conversation that rattles around in a part of my brain that writes the poetry.

There is a line from a conversation on a couch in a hotel in Miami that has a poem waiting to be breathed into life.

But it is not here yet.

I am here still.

Writing.

Thinking about writing.

How it feels.

Fuck me.

It feels.

So.

Good.

And I am a pleasure seeking missile and this is what I think about.

This flow, this ease, it is so luxurious.

I don’t have to do much and the words just flow like jazz scat scattered on my skin, kissed with music and words.

It is a drug this.

Such pleasure.

The writing that I am thinking about is the writing that both scares me and pulls me along.

Write the book.

Write the book.

Write the book.

I have written tens of books, if you layer all the blogs together, there are books, upon books, upon books. The dissertation, the three memoir manuscripts, the boxes of notebooks.

The proliferation of words is not hard for me.

I think you have gotten the gist of that.

It is in the crafting and the vulnerability of really looking at what I have.

31 years ago I was an unhoused, terrified (I wouldn’t have said that, I would have said, “curious” or “adventurous” or something that belied the obvious dissociation I must have been in to do the things I did) living in Homestead, Florida.

Aside, I just Googled Homestead, Florida.

I have never done that before.

I won’t do it again.

Gave me ugly goosebumps.

Anyway.

I wrote a memoir about that time.

One of the things that I reworked and worked on more and I think took into five drafts?

But still I think is shit.

And I spent a lot of time on the fifth draft when I lived in Paris.

I sent it out to a lot of agents.

I queried almost daily.

I got almost nowhere.

Very few responses.

Very few interested people.

But I did it.

And I think now, I think, do I unearth it?

Do I rewrite it, fictionalize it perhaps.

Very few people in there that would be affected by my writing it, very few people that I even remember the names of.

Leon.

E.

Billy Ray.

Myself.

Three major players.

One bit player.

One love triangle.

And a lot of crack cocaine.

Under the table construction.

Living in shacks on the edge of the destroyed Fort Andrews Air Force base, sometimes cars, sometimes tents.

Trips to the Circle K for roller hots dogs, generic cigarettes and wine coolers.

When there was money.

And when there wasn’t, stealing from the gas station a couple miles away.

I never stole, I was a patsy to a couple of different thefts though.

Sigh.

So much fodder.

Alligators.

Moldy hotel rooms.

Cold showers in the dark at construction sites when I had not showered in days.

The smell of wood lath after being smashed by a sledgehammer–I did demolition at some of the house sites the boys worked on.

Sonic Burger drive in when we were flush.

Dine and dashes, my first one at a Keg South bar and grill with Billy Ray.

The taste of really bad Rose in a cheap wine glass.

Coral rock.

The sunset that I will never forget, 31 years later, it is still seared there on my brain like a still in a movie that I can’t quite shake.

And this girl, me, this woman, young, brash and brazen and running, who just kept surviving and putting that next foot in front of the one in front of the one in front of the one in front of the other.

Going blistered footed ever forward.

She is there too, in the cracks and crevices of me.

Maybe.

Just maybe.

I go back and I write a epilouge.

I write framing it in this now.

In this moment of my life.

Aged fifty.

Aged with lines around my eyes that crinkle far too deeply.

Aged and achy for the heart of that girl/woman/child.

Oh am I ever just a child, adrift in the stars over the dark water of the Lake, the warm nights, the sparkle of Miami that was so far away, so unatainable.

Little did I know where I would go, where life would take me, and that one day, many, oh so many years later, I would make my return.

And the sun on the face of the man in the car is not the sun on the face of the man in the car.

It is there bright and washed pink golden orange red burnished in the sun setting behind the Miami skyline, promising me something more than I had thought possible.

If I so chose.

And.

I think.

I think this time I do.

I think it is time to make that choice.

It is.

Time to write.

Translucent Honey

On the time that covers you.

Golden down

Whisper quick

Flicked with lust

And

The first kiss

Blush of love.

September sun against surreal

Blue skies.

Your eyes

Blue too.

Pupils dilated.

I remember.

Oh soft my heart that does always bear such remembrance.

Push my memories aside.

Focus on the now

Cloud of time.

Reminisce no more my love.

Lost in songs,

Mixed tapes,

Love letters,

Tattooed messages of

Forever

&

Eternity.

Momentos of our brief,

Too brief.

So brief.

Why so fucking brief?

Time.

Yet there.

There

It goes again.

In the whippet quick beat of my heart

Pulse dancing to the possibility

That one day.

Oh.

One day.

I will.

(yes please)

See you again.

Until then my sweet.

 

~Stay golden~

 

A Time I Will Never Forget

I am appropriating your words again, my love.

You renamed something of ours.

It was appropriate.

The re-naming.

I approved.

I responded.

I know.

No contact.

I don’t know that you saw it.

But.

I hope that you did.

And I said.

“Nor will I, my love.”

Nor will I.

I can’t forget that time, our time.

The city we were in.

The heat.

The warmth of you next to me on the stoop in Brooklyn.

Our picnic that I put together.

The way the day’s sun had warmed the cement, the call of the birds settling in the trees.

The same birds that would awaken us in the morn.

They seemed to call to me.

Here.

Now.

Be with him.

And I gave myself to you.

I have no regrets.

In the giving I was given to.

The sacred radicalism of our love.

The driver the night before as we came over the bridge from one borough to the next.

She asked us if we were married.

We weren’t.

But you know.

We were.

We are.

Married and joined in some other way.

I felt betrothed to you.

I still do.

I write about that sometimes.

I haven’t told you that.

I still write your name, in its fullness, in my morning pages, and that I am married to the great love of my life.

Then.

Yes.

I list all the places we will travel to.

Places we have already been.

But will need to go back and reclaim.

And places that we will go to.

And make them ours.

Today I was in such a place.

Out by the sea.

Rockaway Beach.

It is not a particularly luxurious spot.

There is something rough and redneck about it.

And yet.

As I ate my three egg omelet at the table in the cafe while I watched the ocean come in and go out, I could not stop thinking of you.

I could see us in the hotel room where I am staying.

Alone.

My room-mate never showed for the intensive.

I could see you and I here.

Together.

Then in the cafe later, having a very late breakfast, drinking too much coffee, making plans to build bonfires at the beach.

Telling each other stories from our rebellious youth.

I could see your face across the way.

So real.

I teared up.

I cried over my three egg with cheese and bacon omelet.

Then.

Damn the music sometimes.

One of the songs that you put on my dance card came over the sound system.

REALLY?

I thought.

Really.

Now.

In this moment.

Right now as I am figuring out the tip for the waitress.

She wasn’t great but she’s my waitress and she’s going to get at least 20%.

Once a waitress.

Always a waitress.

And that song.

Not even a recognizable Elvis song, or an obvious heartbreak song.

Just something to dance to.

Remember.

When you made me that playlist.

And we went to the beach.

It wasn’t the best time at the beach.

I think we actually fought.

But we made up.

We always made up.

I wish we were making up now.

Instead of being nostalgic for another time.

A past time.

A memory that grows, though not distant, removed.

I miss you baby.

I wish I was making more memories with you instead of trying to reconcile not being with you.

I wish I was writing you poetry that you would actually read.

I wish you had been next to me, not just at the cafe.

But at the beach.

I saw the plume of a whale spout.

Then a humpbacked breached.

I gasped a loud and reached for your hand.

I almost fell off the damn rock I was sitting on.

Reaching for something that is not there.

Grief.

Yes.

Grief.

For a time I will never forget.

For a man I will always want.

For a love that is not mine to have.

But.

I had it anyway.

And no one can take that away from me.

Not anyone.

Now.

Or.

Ever.

Random Images

Daydreams and revery.

Blues songs on the radio station you programmed in my car.

The blue of the ocean in my rear view mirror and the trembling thought of wild-fire in my heart.

You like a car in a meadow filled with flowers and tall grass.

A car with the windows open and soft snow falling inside it.

I saw that car today.

Barbara Lewis on the stereo.

A soft kiss of nostalgia.

I wanted to climb into that car in the heat of summer, to cool off, to be dusted with that soft snow.

I would open the door, climb in and settled down.

No need to change the channel on the radio station.

Just lay my head back against the seat and let the snowfall of memory engulf me.

I could ride around all day in that car.

Eyes closed.

Leaned back.

Checked out in the glossy remembrance of your embrace.

Your smell would wrap around me like a chambray shirt.

I want to curl up there.

On that seat.

In that car.

Drive forever.

I would look up at the ceiling and realize that the roof top was open and the snow fell from the heavens above me.

And then notice that it was not snow falling.

But stars.

Soft and cool.

Stars dusting my shoulders and glittering in my hair.

Star shine.

Moon shine.

Love shine.

I would hold your hand.

Press it to my mouth.

Wanting only to drive down the night into the sunset of my never-ending always longing desire for you.

I don’t know where that meadow is.

Full of flowers and light and monarch butterflies.

Birdsong.

Love song.

Heart song.

I don’t know where that car is either.

Yet.

I sense it there.

In the whispering of my psyche.

In the skeins of time.

Waiting.

Just waiting.

For you to pick me up.

And.

Drive me home.

 

Your Face In The Moonlight

The birds singing, each to each, in the branches outside the window in the morning.

Your face lit up, eyes wide, your hands reaching for me.

“You are so beautiful,” you said.

Then you kissed me.

Held me.

Melted into me.

I can still feel your embrace.

I can still see your face.

Your face in the moonlight.

I woke up in the night.

No reason.

No rhyme.

Just sudden, as though I had been tapped on the shoulder.

I opened my eyes and there you were outlined bright.

Still.

Perfect in your slumber.

The moon bathing in you in sublime wonder.

I will always see you that way.

Amongst the many ways I see you.

I took your hand and fell back asleep holding it.

I remembered the words from the sonnet I read you in the afternoon.

So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

That sweet, sacred afternoon, spent on the leather couch in the front room.

Reading Pablo Neruda poetry to you.

Your head in my lap, my hand brushing through your hair, stroking your cheek.

Until you fell asleep.

Outlined soft in the warm air of love drifting up from the rise and fall of your chest.

I read to you long after you lay sleeping cradled against me.

The soft words raining down on your face.

I want you to hear my voice in your dreams.

I want you to know that I am always here.

In the shape of the moon as it waxes and wanes.

In the kiss of warm air on your skin.

In between the songs of lovebirds and the skein of time.

I am here.

Love.

To hold and to have.

Always.