break halves into words and words into morsels of salted meat for thirst between fingers before gently opened mouths hungry for one kiss more. two hands tired of breathing on hips longing upwards and we both dream living. and time stops.
daughter fear
warm days chilling into the night. she is afraid of me when she is in pain. a splinter in her toe, my mad grip on her foot with tweezers to dig it out. i let her go, she was sobbing, shocked, i broke some sort of trust with her. you say i am imaging things, but today, she was running, joyfully, trotting to our car. i had our son in one arm, i was watching her little feet dance forward along the pavement, admiring. she reached our car, she stopped but for some reason then stumbled. landed on her face, her hand. i ran to her, tried to help her up one armed, baby still in my other grip. she was sobbing hard, screaming in pain. i needed to see the damage, if there was any, my little girl. and i looked and looked but she was reluctant, afraid. small scrape on her nose, another above her lip, slight swelling off center. but she so afraid, afraid of what i would do next to fix it. and all i could do was hold her and promise her that she would be alirght. that i wouldn’t do anything to make it worse. i wouldn’t do anything at all.
turning four
my little one, i dreamt you. i loved your mother and you came to me in a dream. i saw you and heard your laughter. i saw you in a dream and suddenly you were here.
and you are everything i had imagined, you are everything i had hoped for. i dreamt you and you became real. i dreamt you and you came to me. you came to me and i became real too.
flux
the world moves like this, small little steps of intense focus and blip it is gone. it comes much easier than this. the man sits across from me and says delightedly, strippers come to me from miles abound. i note the intonation and refile through useless notes that turn me blind. my friend says, this is all very surreal and i reply, i know, we’re going to become a different class of people aren’t we? and in a matter of hours my three year old turns four and already she is unknown me, a mysterious animal with much charm and beauty and great potential for violence. these are exciting times, i tell my lover, i’m quite nervous. and she says, it’s all like a dream come true.
my skin is my own
i sputter about, half mad, half exhausted, a pinwheel run amok. between desire and disgust, i look in the mirror and finally recognize myself, i truly see myself. grizzly, barbaric, poetic soul in the trappings of a beast. my skin is is my own. there is no redemption, only the constant yearning for it, only the constant attempt. try again. fail again. try harder, fail harder.
sunbreak
the quality of the sun never lies: it always begins with the sun, a change in the angle, the quality of warmth. the sun is very clear when it will be ready. and as I sit in it as of for the very first time I am moved impossibly to tears. It feels as if i’ve been in the dark and cold for far too long.
patter
and in this there is the soft patter of the rain, an incessant thing that does not leave me alone. What a terrible comfort.
pearl-saliva-tree-fingers
i shovel a mouth
full of pearls, gritty and shiny
until my teeth crack
and my tongue flattens
out of over my jaw and the edges
push against the base and i would
choke with laughter if it wasn’t for my ribs
heaving and collapsing, an armadillo
of bones, and instead
i stretch backwards until i can see
behind me and all the world
suddenly makes trees weeping their limbs
into the mud and fingers sprout out like grass
writhing without palms and
she would have been born without a palm
and i cough out the pearls bloody and sticky
and the saliva drapes over my eyes
but nothing ever blurs, not even the fingernails, not even
the swirls of a thousand fingertips
to be simply blind
lax and cracking, like a painted petal falling apart at the seams. she needles and threads through another day while her spine unravels at her children’s fingertips. i sat solemnly on the porch waiting for the sun to bring some warmth to these bones. a dog across the street mangled the hedges and my neighbor lost his mind throwing cartons of cigarettes at it. these are the things dreams are made sour, she said, and rolled off the skin from her elbow down to her wrist like a glove, bloody and thick. between the veins and bones i saw a pulse and then could not see anymore. to be blind in the heat, i whispered, to be simply blind.
a perfect dream
the truth is i do not spend enough time with them, i am caught up in my own obsessions, in my willful emptying of space, place, in disappearing into the circuits, into the nonsense minutiae of rights management and authentications, the technology of disappearing or disappearing into technology. i fall asleep exhausted into my daughter’s arms, she grasps me through the night, and i sleep and sleep and find rest. my son, my daughter, my wife, all in my arms, a perfect dream