Category Archives: Poetry

I consider creeping out
before you wake, out the door
and into the road and down it,
until this place dwindles.

Do not mistake my meaning:
I do not wish to be rid of you.
I only need some nights to be
elsewhere. I have become
too familiar with these walls,
with the silences and sounds
creaking and speaking between them,
with the shape of my body
between them.

I will go out now.
I will go out and I will stand
in the road and look down its miles
and wonder how many I could wander
before dawn came up and you.

I think you keep secrets under your skin
like trees keep rings and do not know it,
like the sea teems,
like dark and quiet space
keeps every ray of light
the stars whispered to one another
when they were still young
and dying to make love.

I think you keep secrets in you
like the desert keeps sands,
like sleep keeps dreams,
like cities keep sleepless people
and people looking for sleepless people
to fall asleep with.

I think you keep secrets
like secrets like to be kept

I want to learn them all.

Yesterday,
you made the offhand comment
that you would like to learn
how to swallow swords,
maybe to join a circus,
maybe just for a party trick.

This is good,
because I do it every day
and here is how:
stand up straight,
shoulders back,
and tilt the head
to open the throat.

Close the eyes,
breathe out and calm,
concentrate,
whatever you do
don’t waver this time
and just before
everything I have ever
meant to say to you
bursts out, gulp
and swallow it down,
swallow it down.

Tonight, after your medicines
capsize you, after you sink
into the churning depths of sleep,
I am going to walk down
to the shore of the sea,
down past the white sand dunes,
down past sandspur and panic
grass, down to the dark wet.

Whatever chemical dreams
you dream, they will comfort you
long enough for me to fall
on my knees, put my head
against the soaking sand
and crash headlong into the surf.

I’m going to open my mouth
as wide as it will go,
and let the ocean rush in.
I’ll drink deep, swallow gallons
and gallons of sea and shells
and galleons rotting under the waves.
All the humpbacked whales
and shark-stuck suckerfish
and the red seahorses, too.

I’ll swallow the Great Barrier Reef
and the Strait of Gibraltar
and every single one
of Sinbad’s Seven Seas,
just to put out the fire
that scorches my brain
everytime I think of you sinking.

I’ll drink the sea dry
to keep you afloat.

I read them,
and then I threw them in the trash,
but make no mistake, I read them.

I swallowed them whole.
I filled my eyes with every word,
I sewed them in patterns
into my flesh of my body,
at night I wake to entertain the ghosts
lounging in my bedroom
with impromptu recitations
of your letters, of your thoughts,
of the shape of you in words

but I could not keep your letters.

I could not let them languish
in a dusty box, fermenting
into poisons in the closet dark.
I could not let them lie in wait,
like coiled paper vipers
ready to strike the hand that strays
too far and stirs the den.

After the storm,
pieces of terracotta
washed up on the shore,
cast off from some
ill-fated freighter or
dashed-to-bits potter’s shop.

We walked along the sand,
picked them up in handfuls
and tried to imagine
what shapes
they might have had
before they were broken.

Vases or bowls
or ancient statues
of a Chinese emperor’s
bodyguards?

Whatever, they are broken
now and they have become
something else entirely.

Detritus, but beautiful
among the glistening seaweed
and the water and the sand.

Sometimes I grow
so tired of speaking
my emotions to you.

I open my mouth
and dust spills out
instead of feelings.

Dust, and the yellow
wings of moths,
and brittle paper,

scrawled over
with riddles that
lack solutions.

I am coughing up
the black twists
of candle wicks,

oil slicks
and crow feathers
and afterbirth

and all the ash
of every forest fire
burning

to show you
how I feel.