Author: poetryfest

Damn she love explorin’
Took me to another borin’
Museum in Florence
Italian martyrs,
Saints like Lawrence,

Naked white men statues,
I stare in abhorrence.
My eyes start bleeding,
I need visual insurance.

Regulate your business
Like Elizabeth Warren,
Stocks soarin,
“Baby are you
Dow
Dow
Dow
Dow
Dowwww?”

Why you cannoli look
Pasta me?
Penne for your thoughts.
Gelato Gestapo after me.

And “Signore una camicia”
Per favore,
Cover up, bro.

“Keep your eyes up here, dear.”
She looks
Down
Even
Harder.

Signore una camicia!
Sir a shirt,
Skirt,
Anything,

“Dead Italians STILL flirt.”

I don’t know how much to mix
worn hardwood floors and chipping linoleum
every grease you imagine mingling
bacon hitting the griddle
engine in the hands
two generations of what children find
wood paneled corners
pitted with age and attention left elsewhere
bones of the tired couches
and the tired bones upon them
mixing dander and decades
a litany of long dead dogs
that loved the motor-oiled hand that fed it
vinegar and hard boiled eggs and
blue
its smell as much as its feel
I swear it had a scent in the yard
under the shrub that took swatches of skin
repayment for the years of holding nothing
in return for these
blossoming trees
oak over the deck and pine
Douglas Fir from the one Christmas
in the 70s when he was just a father
a few years from grand
when it refused to die

her stomach was soft,
if you slid a butter knife across it
the skin would melt golden.
she is calm in a way
my stomach is not.
i need the steak knife to slice against the grain
of the meat screaming,
‘this way, this is the only way.’
the red that dribbles from a cut piece of meat
isn’t always blood.
it keeps the muscles ready to be made
a beautiful vermilion portrait.

I can feel my feelings—
just as you feel yours.
But I want to wear yours,
to see the world through your eyes.

I want to know your mind
as if we were one thought, one breath,
two souls unspooled in a silent embrace,
wandering the forests of your becoming—
where light and shadow are the same language.

Let me walk with you
through groves of remembered joy,
through thickets where sorrow took root.
I will trim back the dead branches,
until the past no longer claws at your present.

Let me find every river you’ve cried,
turn their currents to whispers.
Let me warm the hollows where shadows nest,
plant seeds where love still hesitates.

I want to know the storms
that shaped your cliffs,
the scars that even time forgot.
Only then can I hold you truly—
with hands that understand their weight.

So take my hand.
Lead me into your fractures.
Let me be both anchor and tide—
the stillness where your chaos
finally rests.

When you finally arrive she will not be happy to see you.
She’ll stay seated on the shade mottled bank of a heavenly
stream. She’ll continue

splashing stones into the stream with her back turned
hard to you while you cry out,
“Mom! Mom!” She no longer wants you.

The connection lost in afterlife. And she might still be hurt
by all the sleepless nights you gave her. Alone in her bedroom
reading library books and trying

not to imagine the worst. You’d gladly let her slap the shit out of you
if it meant she had to hold your gaze and reckon with the sadness.
“I stayed there,” your eyes would accuse,

“You’re the one who abandoned me!” Black clouds will roll in and
darken the hill-scape of Heaven. Her laser-red eyes will crease
your face. She’ll shout how you’re the one who took her pain

pills and never returned. Derisively she’ll question you,
“Where were you, when I was suffering and dying? Out wandering
the darkness, using your drugs and drinking instead of

huddled by my bed, tending to the small fire dwindling in me, almost dead.
Standing outside pressing your head against my death-room door
while I suffered on the

other side. Too small and scared to come inside and comfort me,
to say goodbye.” Her pointing finger will impale me. “It was your choice
that I die without you, not mine.”

She’ll make an awful commotion. Androgynous winged beings
will come to calm her and to consider you coldly while their
magnificent white wings beat you to the opposite bank.

They know sixteen-years-old is no excuse. She will retake her
seat by the stream. She’ll consider the ripples her small stones create.
She’ll smile and begin unremembering the boy who once abandoned her.
And you’ll watch her. Forever from the other side.

She had carried the baby in her body
Held it close as a secret
And I had thought of responsibility
And quavered at the thought of it
Wondering why God would
Make me
Give up me
To care for another
To wipe their little ass
My fingers wet with shit
Towel off their vomit
Stay up with them nights
Not playing my insipid video games
Postpone my failing novel
How dare this baby ask for that?
I resented the life that it wanted.
But how could I know
What it would not get?

I smiled at the ultrasound. There
Was a gaping void, a missing
Star, a pearl-less pearl. And I
Smiled into the emptiness. And
My wife did not understand why.
I had to smile
Because if I didn’t I would have
Been swept away. I was
Swimming and would have been
Devoured, drowned, dashed and done
and sometimes you smile
To the executioner not because
You are smart, kind, sly, or strong
But because it is the wrong thing
To do in a situation
That will never be
Right.

It only feels like yesterday
I sat on the fourth row
As your coffin lay
Frank Sinatra played
Nobody wanted to say
How much they loved you
So I wrote a paragraph or two
On a scrunched up piece of paper
That I later, left in the room
Next to you
It was full of flowers
From some people you knew.

I don’t think you would have liked
The way things went about.

I was brought to you
In a blacked limousine
Sat inbetween
Your daughters
You raised me the same
Since my mum had me
So young.

It was fun.

Fun feels like yesterday
Seeing your face
As I sat behind you
In the crusty leather
The car never weathered
Neither did you.

My love burned as vaporous flame of an unfading autumn,
How we tossed in the golden leaves so solemn,
My passion a roaring blaze beckoning away the misted night,
In utter ecstasy of halcyonian space and light,
Our heated scent the lingering perfume of wildflowers,
And the winter winds bearing down to end our loving hours.

In memory I see you smile in the golden sunshine of the valley land,
Oblivious, secluded, you take my hand to wander tranquilly,
Forgetting the fragrance of the primrose of this quiet valley-land,
Where vine to sanguine-colored vine led us to dance in Nature’s soliloquy.

Ancient woods and gilded mountains folded us within,
I laughed watching you coyly peer on pools of lucid bronze,
I wiped my brow watching you study streams of opal–
On vast vistas of the climbing white pine,
Across fluorescent willows burning emerald gems,
Across fluorescent willows burning emerald gems.

Against the dreamful mauve of mountains floating vaguely,
We rested underneath a sky of bluest sea so succinctly,
How long we lay entwined I cannot say,
But I remember the chill as violet twilight awoke me with a shiver,
Within the faint skies’ faint fringes, we drifted as ghosts far away.

Now I lie here where we once drifted to dream,
How we tossed in the golden leaves a lifetime ago it seems,
My passion cooled to ice welcoming the killing misted night,
Death will be a new ecstasy of halcyonian space and light.

When I fell from my bike, Dad said he had stopped
holding on. Once I knew it was the magic of him
that kept me upright, my gut collided with my reason,
and I hit the hot blacktop. But I got up, brushed off
the blood and the grit from torn skin, and told him
I didn’t need his hand. I balanced on the mailbox
instead, pushed off the curb, connected feet
to machine and wobbled my way through the speed.
My old man yelled at me not to cross the street,
but I was gone into the dusk, knowing damn well
the trouble would be worth it. Now, with that same
exhilaration to brace the wind—free from the bind
of passive dependence—I cast his lost spell on me.