If Your World Was Our World
We would gravitate to gradation
sail across a calm canvas from green grey to pale pink,
hopscotch across your checkerboard of pastel shapes
accept asymmetry and ascend:
levitate towards one hundred half moons
loiter under a single velvet star.
We would tread on your lowlands of infinite dotted color,
sleep by the grainy sea hugging your Sacred Islands
surrender our egos in the chaos of clouds where you craft your angels
and set them free:
humble, simple, carefully discrete.
Travis
Somewhere or nowhere at all,
you vanish into a vast arid vista.
Desert dunes swallow your form,
horizons authorize your exile.
Dirt cakes my face and clogs my calm
confusion stings my vacant eyes.
Vagabond, resist refuge.
Human, envision arrival.
Grounding, Part One
On land or mat weight rocks into heels in a hot bath with oil and salt skin ends and water begins at a breakfast café words wrestle in a corner driving in a car anywhere rural speed slows me down to earth my head is composing in the clouds cooking up a confidence to choose quantifiable messes a future and the elegance of freshness.
Grounding, Part Two
For fear we are built on paper sheet over sheet over sheet restricted to canvas with width height edges and silhouette but no certain depth what happens when paper rips in a flash of light and sensation I remember what I no longer have in unspoken places at the birthday party or dinner table seated with the presence of absence or the innocence of a child eager for freedom unready for responsibility satisfied by conversations with others letters to self and access to loved ones works of art and science and music the good kind of love.
Georgia
Independent or just free-spirited/ stubbornly unyielding and persuasive/ unafraid of her emotions/ dressed in black/ danced to any song/ a sharp visual memory (of people, particularly artists, often as vivid snapshots)/ a sense of delighted amusement with life/ sentimental (mental)/ guilty of falling into the habit of taking deliberate separation from love/ conscious of the subtle, far-reaching consequences of growing up female/ powerfully female/
Holiday
Coated in nebulous white
winter snow showers and chills of loss,
lasting shivers of your absence.
Seasons steal forward
memory stretches back
before changing winds of worry,
beyond days of invincible decline.
Home in sleepy hollow
echoes of your presence ring peaceful.
Strangely, I am warm missing you.
Nice, France
Tobacco dust collects in the cradle of delicate paper
sealed with a lick, kiss my lips
taste my mouth, hold my breath
On the terrace touching a tender sea
time shrinks and shadows split
Sure of our youth we whisper into mismatched mugs
truth like tea too hot to drink
We wait wrapped in lavender moonlight
until a bruised sky breaks dawn
Translucence clouds, light patches thicken
The cigarette succumbs to ash.
Honesty
Once you confessed
now you swallow silence
in summer light
lick old wounds
seasons can't heal.
Last anniversary
you gave her gold earrings
she gave you a look to say,
these are fake too.
The backyard hammock sways
secrets unearthed, I surrender to sleep
impossibly home with you here.
Anticipation
Blind man sleeps to see
night from nightmare.
Light seeps into black palette:
on the flipside of visceral vision
bright flashes flare
where white stars scratch shade.
Stranger in eclipse,
stumble into moonshine:
too drunk to drink
too damned to dance.
Loving Laura
After a brisk walk from east to west,
I enter your fantasy on freestanding canvas
dance into doodles
sample varying moods light with frivol
bees in beehives, monkeys on murals,
mostly perspectival play.
Simultaneously a part and a whole,
a single in a series
I am a friend in your game of ambitious abstraction.
Humbled by scale and tender color
I leave knowing you.