benevolentia

i need to love you— but love's like ivy grown to choke a house, to strangle the poppies and tulips and leave the trees in desert soil, to frame the windows and smother glass broken by the strength of roots gripping at sand once loose on a beach who knows your footprints, and when i have torn up vines by the root, drenched the green in caustic vile, burned the furniture wrought with seeds and thrown away the trowel, i was never more unhappy; i need to love you, to groom the thickening leaves and dense forests in our living room, let my hair grow long and my eyes accustomed to the arid night because you made promises o

If only I could swell like this Milk and honeyed threads of beauty Interlacing his hopes of passion and future But this fairy tale is forgotten and is encapsulated in the hardened dust of pearls It does not shimmer It fades… It does not cry for wounds to be swallowed but lies hidden in the shyness of age struggling with the crippled breath of a stranger unknown to me I quiver youth beneath the sand-papered stars beneath the razor-edged tendrils of the sun yet I stay though I do not want to be afraid For Icarus is above me and I cannot see where it is that my imperfect heart beats Spiraling into the darkness Into the

I'm an appendectomy clean precise slice and flap of flesh like a turned out pocket kissing the surgeon's lips I'm a tonsillectomy vocal chords stripped pierced high above your wires a new frequency of birds crashing I'm an amputation sterile sanitized nip and tuck of dangling leg and arm left for friends to sever on the street and clean with white picket teeth No anesthesia to cloud your face freckles popping like stars or morphine clogging my arteries just bleed out where you left me and the wide world waiting for you to happen.

Do killers dream of oceans - tucked deep in a cocoon, spooning their wives nestled deep in the soft chaos of their arms? Do they walk their children to school, coats neatly buttoned against strangers, and take their tiny hands like wounded birds in their own, counting red cars and clutching bouquets of daisies for the teacher? Can they cook chicken soup like their grandmothers did - fistfuls of parsley and thyme to soothe the iron pot, stirring carrots and potatoes with the first shift of autumn's silver maple? Do they make sandcastles and leave their footprints in the middle of July and count the starfish that nudge and wink in the tidep

You said Kansas was too flat and dry, nothing but a sullen map in the dust as the truck lumbered down the highway. I watched you slug back bottle after bottle of malt liquor, tossing the bodies in the back seat. Dead cowboys you called them, your jaw spoiling for a fight. I kept my hands on the wheel and watched the heat move sideways through the wheat, trying to pretend your chin lived somewhere else and that the sun had something more important to do than watch me drive. We ate egg salad sandwiches the way your mother made them - too much salt and celery  and without the crusts and drank grape soda warm and fizz

His fingertips splashed through the ivory keys With ripples that scattered in rows While windows bloomed petals of watery pinks Each kissing his cheeks with a glow Releasing his notes like a bird caged in spring He untangled the keys from their din Making sense of a sequence not meant to be seen He etches them deep in his skin. He performs for the windows and plays for the halls The curtains will sway in his song The picture frames quiver and jump from the walls Beneath the great rush of his palms. So I open my window, before I lay rest Just to capture a trace of his spawn It's been years since I've heard it, but still I await

Strange how the swans did not return to the lake that June, almost as if they knew something the rest of us did not - some savage instinct or glorious flaw christened and drowning in the water. Their nests had been plucked clean, deflowered - the eggs all gone, the water choked thick and spiteful with weeds. The dock stood as always - knee deep in reeds and apathy, the bald wood showing its age and wobbling. The tide brought its witness - the wide, yellow maw of pollen forbidding the surface to move. You stood on the shore and poked the sand with a stick as if expecting it to to get up and walk away and surprised when it di

I want a girl who thinks with her eyes closed (in black and white) and does not drink chamomile tea. She does not watch movies by Nicholas Sparks and thinks God really is Morgan Freeman or someone she has not met yet. She reads Goethe, Sartre and Salinger and knows Orlando is more than just a city. She wears plain white tees and jeans so faded her skin has lost its color and her shoes chew the pavement with real distinction.