Don't Promise

don't promise me
punctured poems
nor operatic love

don't apologize
for soaking me
in your steeps

they sing of your seed!
this cup is your vessel

swelling me with new
swelling me with becoming

the skin-on-skin
i damn well need to survive

[#72 for this prompt & this one]

Michael

I just don't know
what I just don't know
and stewing won't change that.
But baked apples for breakfast
and bed sheets to straighten
will save me from my imagination.
What else longs for connection?

Sunrise and joy ~
Eternity and a kiss.
My arms for you.

Why ~ It always comes to me

I write mom something in pencil.
It's on lines of a yellow legal pad.
It's nothing, except lacerations.

It's the five of us gathering. I write,
'We're clockwork at the round table.'
We eat supper and canned peas.

It's years later I walk into a mess hall.
It's a man playing ukulele for kids.
I look away from children on folding chairs.

We've never seen Hawaii's waters, Mom.
It's bread spread with butter, cut into
triangles. We say goodnight.

Lacerations isn't right. I know,
because it always comes to me.
It's more like pine needles.

Sweet and pungent. It warrants
pink paper swaddled in a manila
envelope. It's sealed with a kiss.

[for this prompt and #236]

Making Love

Michael wants to be a poet so I talk him into short verse saying, "Take me on the floor. Save us both right now. And the bed stand besides."
And Michael, knowing how to spell words longer than his fingers, reaches my warm. And with my head tilted to the right I read book spines on the shelf. (I want to be a poet too.)

[Just the necessities for this prompt]

All's well

Now that I'm broken
sleep, I ask for a
death by pills
to keep the ghosts
of you & me
silent. Selah ~
means stop & listen.
Shadows don't grow,
I heard a man say in
a haunted house;
they wane.

~Do you want to?~

Splinters

I used to press on lipstick,

Drag my lip through

All that useless sex talk. 

What the hell? I texted nobody,

Except what's-his-name with initials.

All the men lost to yellow chiffon,

Adrift in the terrible San Francisco Bay,

Lost in the Saint Francis lobby bathroom 

And I'm upstairs surely giving him up 

Taking the black man with white teeth

Matching my own spirit of flesh.

No one ever knew my number,

And I am weaker for it. And I am such a liar.

Sex talk isn't as useless as broken headboards.

A Composition

I sit to compose 

but butter is heavy 

I say, 

snow sounds like 

fizzled love 

luminosity is 

leaking light 

because of wanton love 

I am ruined 

in a blink 

I say, 

Am I feathers?  

Cold and clean 

but uncollected

nothing is lambent 

I say, 

disdaining wayward wings