Pandatry
It's weird when
a chapter from your story
fits within a folder,
gets a case number,
like lines of a barcode,
forest of identifiers
that are menacing some nights
and just ink the next.
The year stretches out,
my hands red from trying to mold
its granular form.
It always spins out.
If clay isn't centered on a wheel,
it breaks orbit, the collateral
its entire shape.
I keep throwing lopsided bowls
of last year - broken cups of the year before,
and they'll hold nothing.
They'll never hold anything
but memory, dents and fingerprints
that no one wants to touch.
She says you can tell a lot
about a person from their hands,
reading callouses and palms
like gypsies, a sunday full of
esoteric attentions -
or, at least they seem to me.
I've never had someone
notice the freckle underneath
my bracelets, the excess callous
above my Solomon's curve.
I've never had someone ask
about all the things I've held,
just to know them.
I always get off at this stop.
The train whistle leaves me behind
in a smoke cloud of memories.
They always leave me at this stop, too.
I say I understand in a way that eases
the mountain from their shoulders
as I take my landslide out of the train doors,
their hand-made goodbyes waving
without the courage for words.
This train goes so many places,
and they can't be tied down.
There are so many stops on this train,
but this? This one is mine, they say,
I belong here in this spot,
gilded with my initials, staked-in
plaques refurbished each year
to tell of its founding history.
I'm tired of his name,
his touch, a hot brand
behind my eyelids sometimes
in dreams that leave me too cold
for the summer heat to sterilize my bones.
No one wants to wait for frozen things to thaw.
I don't think it should be hard
to proceed slowly, to build trust
before you expect all its riches,
but then again what do I know?
Nothing but this train stop in this loop
of suitors and visitors who find the knowledge
of this place too stifling,
who see my shoulders and tell me
I'm just fortunate enough
to be strong enough
to carry it.
Sometimes, I want to nail this coffin shut.
Sometimes, I want its headstone to read
'it wasn't my fault,' damnit.
It wasn't my fault.
Rafters bring to mind memories,
the kind you'd pay someone bury
with a bloody shovel on a half moon's night:
no one likes to see the skeletons.
No one likes to be reminded of the death
it took to birth you, as you are now -
take away the screaming, the placenta,
the blood-soaked umbilical cord,
because life is glamorous and
you are now as a miracle...
a fortuitous clash of supernova dust
come packaged in a way that won't chip nails
or turn stomachs.
Just smile and sit pretty - but not too pretty,
and not too boring, and a bit alluring but not too sexy,
and remember that a "real" woman doesn't have anything
that a man can steal because she owns herself completely.
You are not with the responsibility
of celebration, no mourning your grave,
no wearing your skeleton inside out.
Bury that stuff with a shovel,
to the back of a new moon's night,
because a miracle is not a crime scene,
and you don't get to wonder over justice.
My joy is a ringtone for your smile.
Don't pick up. Not all the time, at least.
I want to feel this.
You are a source of wonder.
I pull scratched lottery tickets
from my pocket and wonder
and wonder
and wonder
over winning you, instead.
crown like Saturn,
rings laying claim
to something
I can only
wish upon,
a comet visiting
every seven years.
I still climb mountains
to see you.
Thoughts create skylines
I try to see the stars through;
light pollution swallows
and burps up a moon
you have to shield
your eyes to see.
It's too artificial.
Slow footfalls down dead streets.
They don't live here, anymore.
They don't live here, anymore.
I count the wildflowers
stroking past my fingers,
and ask them of loneliness.
"Define it, please," I ask the lilacs.
They sing to me of the absence of stars,
and I confide, "It's okay, I never see them, either."
Maybe heartbreak
is an edit of the soul.
Something is considered
polished when there is
no longer anything to take away.
I am soft stone, deposited
by the sea, and maybe
it is for the better.
Maybe death is the final edit,
and one's story will be bare
and polished - a headstone.
Life is simply amassing the experience
to jot down - so you have something
to take away from.
Railroads have become compasses
to us. We've never loved less
in the valley of these mountains,
never more outside its edge.
I prefer meetings so brief
they already drip nostalgia.
When the audience swoons
and says "maybe you'll meet again,"
I hope we don't.
It holds a stronger impact.
Railroads are paths to us.
I've been following one, and
while its hidden beneath the earth
my feet know the turns.
I don't ask how I know.
I just know.
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