The Ride Home

I wish I weren’t you
I wish
my hands would sit like
yours do
I wish I had
a way to hold your name
and say the things
I’ve never
dared to say

I wish
I was the one to be
the way you chose
to be – because
I wouldn’t do
the things we hope
to do before
we’re old
– I’d do them too
but I’d just wait
until the time comes through
and lets me
run without –

I’m shaking and
the hopes you held
are shattered here
Like lives that never
matter here
Anxiety and fear are close
We hide them well
but why they always find
the cracks we try to pave
the holes we try to hide
I’ll never know

O God, I’ll never know

I’ll never know why
human flesh breaks easily
and human thoughts take
time to hold us
time to hurt us
time to make us
fear the days when we
were young
and made our grand amends
our promises
our hopeful lies
our rhymes and tongues

We all fear – we hear ourselves
We are the ones who
hurt ourselves
We hold our friends
in broken arms
and tear apart the lives
we wished to live
– we sit
and we repeat these lines
This poem just
to fill the time
to still my aching hands
that feel so soft
and yet too hard

And still
I wait –
I wait and see my scars
my thumb that splits
my wrist that burns
my arm that breaks
and fear that I might add
another scar inside
– a scar of emptiness
and broken thoughts
when rhymes are not enough
and I can’t breathe

In and out –
I can breathe again
The night is split
by an endless light
and though it glares
we live in it and
we do not dare
to care about the harshness
of our meager salvation

M.
Dec 12/15
conte, charcoal, chalk, and graphite on brown paper

Similarities

Sometimes I draw strange conclusions between what actually happens and what I perceive. I will think that one is like the other, and then, when I think back, I’ll realize that I was wrong. We all do this sometimes. We hope against hope and get our expectations up – and then, when it all comes to an end – there is a strange discrepancy between thought and action, between beginnings and endings that spin around inside our heads….

Similarities

I draw similarities with my words
Of people, who aspire to lesser things
Of people, who aspire to catalogue the world
in an eternal heartbeat

And after the perfect day
When backlit museum pieces
frame the moonlit night
I wander among the spits of timbers
Cedar carcasses – rent apart – a stage
And hear you whisper into the wind

“I don’t care,” is what I hear you say
It hurts – when I, so foolish
decided you meant to love me
When you – honest man – burnt-wish Templar
decided I meant no harm
No harm at all

“No harm” – these words are akin to existing
in unspecified drones, weak hopes
hollow spaces, hollow minds
and homes without faces in the rain-washed windows

I hope
I hope – the candlelit moonlight speaks
I hope – it wills a dream inside my mind
I hope – it tells me whispers
And shows me little similarities
between the perfection I perceive
and stark – beautiful – intriguing reality

M.
Aug 26/15