poetry
a garden
or children
wiser than we were
then we will leave daydreams
of an ideal world
like traces of music
unheard
reverberating across the sky
and etch the scars
of our separation
like bathroom wall vandals
onto other bodies and souls
and the earth
leaving our denuded
and scorched masterpiece
with not a creature left
to piss on the ashes
a young woman writes in the sand
with a stick of washed up driftwood
faded white as bone:
“Joy”
“Love”
“Empowered”
and then lets the ocean
pull the words into her depths,
as though casting a net
to draw from the universe
the desired things themselves.
I remember writing our names
on a beach somewhere,
inside a heart,
with the word “forever,”
and how we stood
on the cliff above,
looking down on it,
wrapped in each other’s arms.
The waves took that, too.
You know
how this ends.
Maybe I should tell her about that,
but she probably read about
this inscribing-hopes-in-the-sand technique
in some bestselling book,
and I am just a nosy guy
walking alone on a beach.
a piece written
and rewritten
until my brain smoldered,
and the pen
grew too heavy
for my fingers to hold.
We’re a story
no one could write,
though I tried.
Pages upon pages of you,
of angrily slanted scrawls
and wild loops
crossing lines into margins,
sometimes plunging
off the sharp white edge
like a 2 a.m. drunk
driving off a cliff.
I keep them
in my bedroom closet,
their futile ink fading
inside a cardboard coffin,
buried beneath a pile
of old clothes
that don’t fit anymore.