I will mess you up. You are coat.
I will wear you out.

When we touch
it is salt that leaves.

We cannot live without salt.
We are not living if we don’t burn it away
to find more.

Oh, furious love,
I can still hear you.

And when you are still
I can hear you more.

How do I feel about you?
My answer: snoring, luxury dreaming, running from cliffs and bouncing,
naked in school and unlearning your legs into winglets,
chasing the devil and choking him out,
the Emerald City, the heartless, the unbrave,
the small, the brain-dead, witches and all,
welcoming us as royalty.

I love you in sleep.

All your records are in the wrong jackets.

You can send someone compassion
in First-Class Mail
and if they can’t accept it
or wear it like perfect pajamas,
it will return to you
and sit on your porch all beaten up.

If your affection grows in turbine gusts,
it will not meet them, it will pass through them like zephyr,
the hole will be tundra. You will be a piece of snow in it.

I used to tell people poetry is hidden in everything. It isn’t hiding.
It is waiting, just waiting for someone to call it on a Thursday night,
or ask it over for chili, or hold it tightly until it catches its breath

I miss all your smells.
I ponder what they really are
cause they aren’t impossible saffron, or new lemons, or cinnamon sex mix.

It could just be soap. I miss your soap.
I can’t name it. Why do tears come?

I believe I am happy
and don’t
know what to do with it.

I’ll let it all slide down my face
and drop onto my tongue.
I sing the words:
How will I ever go back from here?

It’s good to look a dream in the eyeball and not look away.
It’s good to have a voice that can speak the language of resuscitation.
It’s good to be beat down like the sun to prove you can burn and rise.

I don’t believe what you say
but
I appreciate your tone.

I told you your kiss made me feel like Winston Churchill
and you said- powerful?
and I said- drunk.