1

Time is a thief and it’s stealing you away from me.

After your death, people told me it would get better with time. But they were wrong. All that happens with time is that I get further away from you. Every second, every minute, every day, every month, ever year. It has almost been four years and I am further away from you now than I have ever been but I will be further still. Much further. Infinitely further. So far that neither one of us will exist anymore.

No Known Unknowns

I am hurt here: waiting

the mind drifts into

no known unknowns

I remember the curve of your hip,

I think

the light bending up against the

hairs on your forearm

you

had everything, I had

my writing

the endless pages in endless novels

speaking wholly to the unknown

but at least it was honest

now I contort under the

heavy weight of the plates shifting

and squirm in my chair at the mere mention

of your name but then am reminded

constantly of life or of the strange

far away memory of a life shared

communally,

broken and divided into even pieces so that

at the end of the day you

could walk away with what was yours and

I mine

but there was still no way that

we were even.

Rewrite

I wonder what it is like

on the other side of the earth.

I had a dream that you were a baby

that died in your crib.

I turned back time

and you grew up into a strong young man.

I knew that I couldn’t save you forever

but I tried.

I tried.

Why does it still feel like

you just haven’t come home yet?

This lingering feeling in the background

that you will come back.

If I wait long enough

you will come back.

If I try hard enough

you will come back.

If I ask nice enough

you will come back.

If it hurts bad enough

you will come back.

A smarter man than me once said:

everything real is happening in this moment

and everything else is just a story

that you tell yourself.

I want to start this story over.

I want to believe that it could have had

a different ending.

Moonlight

On Tuesday,

there are poems

that want out of my mouth.

One of them starts with your hair

and ends with the silhouette

of you standing in my doorway.

How we knew before we knew,

how we can tell everyone that.

On Wednesday,

I find my body as a map

from my house to yours.

I want to make landmarks

in the shape

of your hands.

I want to make my limbs

into roads

that unearth the weight

in getting lost.

Roads that only we

will travel together.

On Thursday,

your arm is draped across my knee

in a dark movie theatre.

Normalcy becomes a light in the fog,

a position we fight to keep taking.

Friday,

we stay up in the secret hours

before the dawn

and it is here

that you tell me that you love me.

Since then,

there are a thousand more poems

that want out of my mouth.

Each one beginning

and ending with you.

Little By Little

I used to measure

the length of our relationship

by how many times

I had trimmed my

fingernails

since we had started

sleeping together.

I would sit on the edge

of the bathtub,

splitting my nails open

and peeling them back

to their keratin root

hoping to rid myself

of the hundreds of images

that had accumulated there

because of you.

Do you remember

how badly

you used to want to die?

Yeah,

well

so do I.

You used to disappear

into thin air

so often

that I wasn’t sad

or angry

just resolute

in never understanding

what had truly happened

to you.

Once,

I grew my nails out long

so I could draw blood

to the surface

of your back

just so that I could prove

that you were still alive

somewhere inside

of there.

But I never really knew,

were you?

32135

I watch the flag to see if it’s dropping

if I have missed something in the

universal split second of my mid-morning walk:

if tragedy has wormed its way into the still crisp air,

if the dew that forms rain drops that rest atop blades of grass

became another shitty metaphor

for tears permanently rooted to the earth, or

for the land that never gets to stop crying.

I watch the flag on its pole exist as a sliding scale

that starts at afraid and moves down to more afraid and

down still to everything now lost and down further

to everything now buried.

A country, a collective whole

held to a system where violence,

death and senselessness

wear us like a well-fitted suit,

one that’s adjusting its tie

just right outside of our peripheral vision,

one that tailors itself to the reaction, the ends, the means

with a quiet precision in the hemming of our heart break

until our hearts forget how to break or

until they have just gotten used to it.

One For the Times

We don't have to watch as a white man

reminds us of the way that history is circular

like a chain that won't break unless we learn

to cut everyone's hands free, first

the sound of a lantern being lit,

the crackling of kerosine

to drag men, women, children

down dark, narrow passageways

of time, second

the sound of a torch being lit

to light up the ugliness that hides

in the shadows, no

it wasn't in this order but it has been this

way all along, no

time passes between the passageways from

hatred to oppression to violence to

death, no

it has been this way all along.

I fall in love with a man

who calls ugliness out by name,

who isn't afraid of the confrontation.

We decide together that this hill,

the one that people have been trying

to climb for centuries,

this is our hill to die on.