Oasis

---

i avoid you as if my life depended on it
but sometimes i do ask for you
to hydrate as I dehydrate, i say
beside my morning jolt you taste so clear
and refreshing, the cascade
like morning dew i feel you collect in my pores
this is such an unexpected feeling
each time, and it makes me wonder
why I'm such a fool to resist
what so obviously is good for me.

---

Ethics

--

It is not for false equivalency's sake that I force myself to seek balance in my reporting, but for the fact that trying to describe the world through a cracked mirror is often times worse than having no mirror at all.

--

The Incarnations

---

"I am your soulmate," you told me,

and later, after reminding me of
our incestual lies, cruel past lives,
murderous concubines, and the way
our yin and yang always met in blood
I told you that we hardly fit
my definition of soulmates.

"You are wrong," you told me,
for it is always the ones you love
who are able to hurt you the most.

---

Requiem Song

i want to go

where nobody knows

the strong grass grows

the mountain snow

and footsteps show

after i go

-----

all things fleeting and good

---

shit i'm starving
i haven't eaten for a while
can you tell me what it's like
to be full? man cannot survive
on bread alone, but the spirit, too
and me here with neither.

if i'm perfectly honest
i've never taken good care
of myself, or other things
on loan; but everything else
is so beautiful
how could you ever
say no?

---

City of Dreams

---

i'm constantly falling

in and out

of love with this world

it's exhausting

so who could really blame you

for choosing to leave?

---

all that we leave behind

---

if i told you this story in passing
would you tell it
tell it well?

this story that's in passing
would tell it.
tell it, well?

this story about passing
would telling it
tell it. well?

this story of my passing
would you telling it
make it well?

---

Grace

---

with fresh sight
i can see
the subtle curve of the mason jar
the refracted light on the counter top
the plants at the window in their particular shapes
the vivid blue of the aquarium fish
and the new one, the snail, plodding its way
i can see
the pizza boxes still half full from the night before
my sea shells bound in bright red rope, and hanging
my passport and tarot cards wrapped together
my Bali batique and my factory sarong
and the way summer's end
brings sunsets purple and new.

---

Letter to the One Whose Library Slip I Found

---

i wonder what you were looking for in the library walls
i was looking for peace in between the titles
(i've found the best walls are porous, and between their gaps,
filled with light) and i picked up
The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate
A haunting novel about the ways we hurt, and are hurt
by the people we love the most

the first page was a quote from Isak Dineson
The cure for anything is salt water -- 
sweat, tears or the sea

i discovered your library slip
wedged at the divide
where chapter two ended
and chapter three began
as such passing-ons must

the checked out title on the ripped sheet
was The brief wondrous life of Oscar
but you must have used this as a bookmark
to save your spot
last December, when it was colder, and
you were a different person than you are now

i wondered what caused you to stop there
were you thinking of your brother, too?
when you read: No one has been where I've been.
No one. or was it the question, left, forever, unanswered
you gonna stay clean this time? 

i kept reading, tracing my fingers along each line
and imagining that i'm dragging you along, too
Items checked out to: SHERIFFE, SIVAN E
Due Date: 01-12-16
i think about Googling you
it would be easy, you know
it's easy when you have
your own name

but i don't.

i wonder as you read along in my mind's eye
what you would have thought if you'd read
she looked like music and sunshine
what does that even look like? or is it the way
someone makes you feel, a selfish descriptor
the adjective applied that tells you less
about yours than mine
i wonder, Sivan, if you see yourself
as music and sunshine when you flip through pages
and search for peace.

they say that matter reacts to being perceived
that the very act of seeing affects
that a tree that falls in the forest
is different than the tree that is heard
and i wonder if in all the seven billion people
there is someone thinking of me
the way i do, of you, now, anonymous
swallowed in the sea of turgid human thought
and i wonder if I would feel it
if they were.

-----

Family Knows Best

----

i realize now
that your greatest gifts to me
are the words I don't want to hear
and your willingness
to say them

----

Odysseus

---

i've always been fascinated
by old fisherman's tales
but it's not the myths of monsters,
or heroes, that haunt me.

It's the stories
of those who heard
the siren's call
and chose
to stay

can you imagine that?
hearing her on the horizon
and shattering against her rocky shores
and choosing, to stay?

she waits for me
still, today
in open seas
but i refuse to go
where others
have found a way

if you look over the bow
into the choppy row
and see the way
the waves remain
always moving
forward into
a new flow, and
the promised ebb

and my own ship
steers clear
of any rocks, or
perilous shores

it has broken, already, before
and will again, this, I know

but now

i am tied firmly to my mast
i am the convinced captain of my way
i am the horizon that beats ever on
i am the shore that's never home.

---

multitudes

----

if we're going to turn a blind eye
on the world
let us turn our blindness
on all of it
let us flip the light off on
the graduating son in da 'Burb
as we did the
son shotgunned in da 'Bronx
let us blindfold
the sunrise
as we did the
gay man's cries
let us mute our tongues
to laughter
as we did
to slaughter
as we did
to Istanbul and Orlando
to San Bernardino
to Chattanooga
to Newtown and Aurora
and Blacksburg
and Columbine

if we wake up
to a world we'd rather not live in
let us either close the binds entirely
or walk into the dark
with the sun at our backs

----

miscommunication

----

what words does it take
to fake
a feeling --
is it the syllable
or rhyming
that makes
the reasoning?

so much understanding
just dying to be understood

----

a golden gate

just let the fog

roll over you

and knead you over

so certain it has a name

(remind yourself:

It. Has. A. Name.)

remind yourself

that with time

all things

are named

---

Creation

----

that's the rub of it,
isn't it?
you think things into being
that never think of you

----

give thanks, and, remember

----

and as i leave my resting place
and watch the sun reflecting,
sky connecting dots, and
morning murmurs, and
the coffee black, so
hot i watch it rise
an offering of
wisps

i wish there were ways to remember this
where such instagram filters don't exist

----

To love a hummingbird

----

to love a hummingbird
is to love constant motion
the thrum of held suspension
the imperfect incessant
all dripping wings
of want

to love a hummingbird
is to love the come and go
compelled by sweet nectar
the pendulum of desire and
the thrill of floating
the hibernation that must follow
such exhaustive metabolism
to love a hummingbird
is to learn to love the moment
long after it's gone

and faced with your own insecurities
it will feel like you can love a hummingbird
in the palm of your hand; resist that urge,
and know, hummingbirds are never yours
but their own, and the world's

because to love a hummingbird
is to love fleetingly

----

Syntax

----

at first, i thought i could be the space
to fill with    "whatever"    you thought
and then be easily replaced, once
you found the word that you want

then, i thought i could be the comma,
the "to be continued," the note before
the crescendo,  the beginning,
but never, the end

later, i thought i could be the exclamation point
straight, unwavering -- full of emphasis!
to give you the closure you craved
at the end of all your unfinished sentences

for a time, i even thought that i could be the period.

(and here, the parenthesis: I need you to know
that i never wanted to be the solution)

now, i know i was the question mark
bent and unasked, late at night and
wrapped around you

still seeking answers of my own

----

the view from beneath my feet

---

when planes fall (or fly

into not air) they drop

notes, dipped in ash like names

that we promised to remember

the pact of being born (and full

of life) but, somehow,

we have forgotten

we do not have that in us
to remember

--- 

Fool's Gold

----

after a sudden and desperate rain
the sun drips, tempts, like honey
slow, and impossibly sweet
drying drops on leaves like mascara
until it should rain again

----

A Blank And Noisy Fog

---

why are you still

at war with yourself?

you pick up your pointed edge

and walk into a white and empty field

to muster the words to describe

your suffering again

the battle that never ends

between you, yourself and your pen

it was just a false alarm

this time, he said

as if a war with yourself

was just another

game of kids playing targets

with their growing spines

and i, wait, knowing

there is no way to avoid

the coming bloodshed

of black and angry splotches

of ink that bleeds

through canvas

the blank page 

demands to be filled

one way, or

another

with me, or

my brother

---

Drops of Some Far Away Planet

---

my finger hovers
over the skip button
but i keep the song on
because it reminds me of
something once felt
and now that i dream of
a sunspot room and
incense and the
filled upedness of
days lost in the pages of
something bigger than myself

---

Brick

--- 

Brick is the eye

of the beholder

Brick the coffeehouse facade

in Trendytown

lit by orb lamps

and succulents

Brick the closed factory

the wires laid bare

entwined to fresh canvas

of graffiti’d air

Brick the messenger

that flies straight through

the window of
his grandfather’s home

Brick the college town

and abandoned steeple

the famous band

and the show

they played

Brick the builder

clay and shale

bent and pressed

then fired

Brick the memorial

lasting and durable

eternal the way

memories are not

Brick the rowhouse

the color of rust

and jobs and puddles

left by black boys

Brick the feeling

of sinking
at the bottom

of it all.

-----  

Shame

----

Shame
lives with me
she eats my breakfast (or
doesn’t)
she carries my hands in her pockets
loose change spent (or
discarded)
she wanders my mind's grocery aisles
always looking, never choosing
wasting (time) she
lingers like the overdue books
i never get to reading
she watches with me (always)
the Monument sky turn black
grips me assured (and
tight)
the promised creep of night
she tucks me in
to my bed of days. weeks. months.
she awakens me
to a bloodshot sunrise
she eats my breakfast (or
doesn't)

----

Six Ways to Describe Snow

----

In Iowa morning, the blue foggy dawn

wraps the white-flaked streets

like a submerged snow globe

Hay bales that form snowmen across the

white plains, cornfields that melt

into oceans of snow

The gusts of ice: they skate across highways

before turning to fog

Like the last gasp of breath

passing through a frosted sieve

Have you ever seen

a cemetery in the snow

the tombs that rise all alone

where no grass or flowers grow?

In Iowa evening, the mist that sits

and drips through air, as if

we've all been shaken

----