A Love Poem for Alcohol

She comes to me liquid and shining,
all hips and promises,
wearing the low light of a bar like perfume.
I never learned her real name,

only the nicknames I murmur

to my pillow at three a.m.

She is always colder than she looks.
Glass-kissed skin,
a bite at the lip that says come closer.
She's always the one to bridge the distance,

knowing I'm helpless for women

who take what they want without asking.

When her fingers trace patterns on my thigh,

the world comes undone.

My shoulders melt away.

My voice turns to honeyed smoke.

I become the woman I rehearse in mirrors;
laughing easier,
wanting louder,
finally fluent in myself.

She tells me I am beautiful
in a way that feels like truth,
even if it fades by morning.
She tells me I am softer than I think,
stronger than I remember,
that I don’t have to carry every sharp thing alone.
Her lies are tender.
That’s what makes them dangerous.

We dance;
me swaying, her slipping through me,
a shared body for a few bright hours.
She fits everywhere,
fills the hollows I pretend aren’t there,
presses her mouth to my doubts
until they forget how to speak.

Other women have loved me
with hands and patience and daylight,
but she devours me immediately.
Urgently.
Like she’s afraid of leaving me untouched.

By the end of the night
she is inside me completely,
and I'm already shivering at the thought of her leaving.
She never stays for sleep.
She leaves me with a ringing head,
and the ache of her laugh in my bones.

Still, I set out another glass.
Still, I wait.
Because there is something holy
about being claimed so easily,
about a woman who turns my edges smooth
and calls it intimacy.

And if loving her is a kind of slow vanishing,

so what.

I've always been a moth

to beautiful flames

that scorch me just right

when they burn out.

To Meet Death

Death is odd.

Its portrayed differently

Whenever I see it in movies.

But I’ve always been sure of how it is.

 

Death sounds like cars screeching, 

A truck’s horn blaring,

A bike running off the road.

Like frail hiccups, wheezing for air.

It sounds like a ringing in the ears.

 

Death feels like the pavement,

Of asphalt and sweat.

It feels like the roasting of muscles,

Gooey rubber melting into skin.

The bushes and thistle a piercing cradle.

 

Death smells like the everyday.

Like the cool morning air,

Of flame floating like cherry blossoms,

The smoke of engines flying past.

 

Death isn't a flash of your life.

Death isn't the patience of waiting for your ferry.

Death isn't the burning of Hell,

Nor the silence of Purgatory.

Death isn't Saint Peter waiting at the gates.

 

Death is nothing.

And yet,

She was everything that night.

Penrose-512 (Scouting Ship)

A Signalis Poem

Steel rivets drip from my bleeding hands,

Nose pressed to red snow,

As I choke my last

Amidst the rot.

The chirps are silent now,

Sheet metal once danced in

Trembling arms

Now rusting by her coffin.

Achtung, burst lung,

Systems failing, critical.

Sobs swallowed hard

like pills.

Hands long gone from chilled controls,

Once running through that sloughing hair,

Now quiet in my groaning halls,

Tumbling to their dreams down here.

As I remain, the doomed ship

Fetal as my charge.

Laid in a ditch, night grows chilled,

Take my remaining warmth.

She’ll come for you,

Joints creaking, cracking,

Skin cold and lonely.

Each cycle I wake

To an error screen,

But the hands on the clock still move

Backwards.

My arms are shaped for you,

My body formed 

To be your home,

The shell of my skin empty,
Brittle.

Now she claws back,

Do you hear her?

The mangled husk bouncing off starboard,

A bug repelled on a windshield.

She made you a promise,

I was your keeper.

This world grates,
It crushes,

It peels back your skin
And rips the life out of you
No matter how you kick and you scream.

But you,

Even as I’m torn apart

I reach out,

Joints cradled gently,

Warm with love 

And auxiliary power.

Because I am soulless,

And so is she.

Yet somehow you're her soul’s mate.

Der beschützer,

I’ve held her for you.

Your dance is still

Unfinished.

Hands on throat unbidden,

Welcome back technician.

I’ve fulfilled my mission,

Penrose powering down. 

A Lighthouse - Poem

There was a lighthouse years ago, on the far flung shore.

A lighthouse built of necessity, not architectural care.

Its owners maintained it to the strictest sense of the word,

Never glistening but never in disrepair.

It sat, inanimate and unmoved.

As it existed only for its purpose.

Some days it would see another lighthouse and dim.

For it knew there was no competition.

One day, a woman came from a nearby land to the lighthouse.

She sat beneath its beacon of light, and whispered platitudes of praise.

“You’re a light among lighthouses,” she would say, and the lighthouse shone brighter.

She brushed aside cobwebs, and polished the tower windows.

She repainted the walls, and refocused the light atop.

And the lighthouse was grateful, as it always would repeat.

For none had ever cared for it outside of a job.

As the women smiled and nodded, “I don’t get what they don’t see.”

One day, the lighthouse refocused its beam upon the northern shore.

Up there, another lighthouse stood, taller and brighter than itself.

Only it didn’t mind, because it was alive as it wasn’t before.

Because there was someone out there to reassure and praise it.

But when its light focused in, there she was again.

Whispering to the other lighthouse, painting its walls brand new.

As if such things were not special, just a motion with which to run through.

When next she came to visit, the lighthouse spoke to her.

“Why do you visit another? 

Am I not a light among lighthouses?”

And the woman smiled a well-meaning smile as she answered,

“Of course you are. 

But I am a lighthouse inspector, you are not the only one in need of care.

It wouldn’t make sense for me to help just one lighthouse.

But call me, when you next need repairs.”

The lighthouse creaked; it was just a job after all.

Its boards once again set rot.

The windows once again fogged.

But to the woman it spoke quietly,

“Thank you for your time.

For you, I liked being alive.”

Then never again did it move.

I Crushed My Love Into Stardust - Poem

I used to think the Hubble was the greatest evil humanity ever built;

A weapon aimed at the untamed cosmos, 

Encroaching the male gaze further upon an innocent universe.

Was this planet on a platter not appeasement enough for their conquests? When man 

Dreamt of the stars, did he imagine woman hand-in-hand, or not at all?

I think I told you that once. Yes, I did. I remember now. 

Sitting on rotten slats of wood, eating cold pretzels, 

Drinking that crappy lemonade with so much sugar it burned. 

Pretending we didn’t hear that car backfiring, hoping it was a car backfiring. 

You told me, “It’s the eye that’s evil, not the telescope.”

I told you, “You sound like the NRA.”

You gave me that look, the way you spoke only we could hear. 

Those eyes like a viewport, previews of colors I’d never seen and noises I couldn’t make.

That was the same day I punched your dad in the face. 

It was like watching a car and a bicycle collide, one crumpling before the horrors of 

Industrialization, tons of pillaged parts from peoples whose languages lay buried under a 

Combination gas station convenience store.

You hated me for trying that, but only because it was a lost cause. 

If thirty years of piss beer and legal fees couldn’t bash his skull in, 

I wasn’t going to do it. I never told you my nose was broken, 

Because you’d feel awful for pressing against it when you kissed me.

You would’ve hated the dress you wore at your funeral.

You always wore suits, old dress pants frayed and painted with mud stains at the hem.

The blush on your face is like a foreign invader, forcing itself upon the sinew

You used to bear. What part of that frilled black dress marks the final clothes

Of a young woman who wore overalls a size too big to catch frogs in the rain?

How does the perfectly curated rose lodged between your still hands reflect

The gritty mitts that tinkered on an old dodge abandoned in a cold lot?

The photo they used for your service; none of them know that you snuck 

Away after it was taken, meeting me at the railway bridge over route 5

Where I held you and promised that at our wedding, we would wear 

Platform shoes and cheap leggings left in the dumpster by the boardwalk.

My hands twitch, as if my brain fires all neurons at once in a creeping barrage.

The chatter around your open casket would have overstimulated you. 

I wish I had brought those knockoff sony headphones you liked

To stride up to your display case and place them over your ears as a queen bears her crown.

Then you wouldn’t hear your aunt tell the crowd that you dreamed of being a doctor;

The fake answer you always gave. I’m the only person left in this universe that knows

You wanted to be an electrical engineer. I know it will die with me.

I haven’t cut my hair since the funeral, my casually cut guise splintered

Without your fingers to fly across my scalp like piano keys, playing a waltz.

Flaky metal, brown like maggots, strikes wood. An hour of digging in the

Gelid rain, undoing the work of disinterested men with a shovel I stole from your dad.

An incision six feet deep, revealing a keel of wood left undisturbed for months.

It’s that rotten wood from our boardwalk, and like our boardwalk it’s being torn down.

I recognize you better now than the mannequin touched up at your wake.

You’re a puzzle with 206 pieces, dressed in clothes you never wore like a children’s doll 

As if to grab you by the waist and let imagination bring you to life. 

Only now, you’d snap at the middle and be tossed back in the bargain bin 

By a child who can’t imagine with a broken toy.

But we were never children, were we?

I raise my boot as to smash an insect, tongue singed by that sugary lemonade 

And the absence of self. Your skull breaks like a fallen vase, beneath combat boots you bought

For my birthday. Chipped fragments scattering like stardust.

A woman scorned, foot crashing down as a gavel. 

Down. 

Down. 

Down.

The shovel would be quicker, but it trapped you here in the first place. It cannot set you free.

When our cities are buried under rubble and folly, and the next men crawl out from the sea like

Baby turtles, they won’t dig up your body. They won’t display you in a museum 

With a cheap plastic plaque, held in glass covered by grubby fingerprints. 

They won’t study you in a dusty room, putting your puzzle back together 

To satisfy their curiosity and ego when they lift you just above

The ground and play pretend with your life. 

I lift my boot, and examine the fine calcium dust you’ve been crushed into. 

The Hubble will never see what’s left of you; the earthly visage of twinkling stars.