Wants and Fears

Lovers

Lovers are for reaching the spots
on your back you can’t in the shower.

Lovers are for keeping the bed
warm when you get up at two-thirty-one AM
to pee your shared dessert wine.

Lovers are for making you breakfast
and everything else when you are either
too lazy, too sick, or just plain
don’t feel like it.

Lovers are for having a good
excuse available at all times:
Family reunion next month? Sorry,
my significant other will be in the hospital
with appendicitis.

Lovers are for ego boosts
that no one else will give you,
even if you beg on your hands
and knees, soaking pebbles into your skin.

Lovers are for having at least
one person on your side,
even when you’re wrong.

Lovers are for reaching the spots
on your back you can’t in the shower.

Dear John

You have to my knowledge
never been in a war
(except maybe one of love);
still, when I write to you, I feel
as if I am writing a Dear John.

Every day I find you facing
some new struggle, some challenge
holding you down.
You just look up at me with those
big eyes and whisper, “Save me.”

Like me, though, you love
a challenge. (You don’t actually
want my help.) You know it will only
make you stronger. In the end,
you whip yourself up and finish
what was started.

Cliches, I admit, but just as true
as the day they were first
said. Just as true as how I frame

each and every letter: Dear you,
Love, me.

Twice Dead

When the driver swerved, he already
knew he was
not
going
to make it.
But he allowed himself to laugh,
just before the eighteen-wheeler
plowed into the hearse:
the guy shut up in a coffin
in the back would be twice
dead.

To A Winged Fellow

What thou art we know not – “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

What kind of bird, I cannot be sure,
though to this I can attest:
you caroled and crooned in the summer rain
while away did hide the rest.

I ask you, sweet, how can it be,
that unlike drops of rain,
despite your somewhat greater weight,
your flight you do attain.

And there, that bite of bright blue sky,
is that for which you wait?
Or do you seek yourself instead
a darling little mate?

Sing low for me, if you do please
or warble a bit instead;
serenade with all your zest
while I lie upon my bed.

There Are Voices Outside My Window

There are voices outside my window,
though I don’t know what they say;
perhaps they speak of love and jest,
or maybe of yesterday.

There are voices outside my window,
I have heard them above an hour;
they have a sing-song quality,
from here up in my tower.

There are voices outside my window,
they float from down below;
they mingle with the cars and trains,
and with the sweet wind blow.

There are voices outside my window,
can’t you hear them, too?
I’d like to go and join them,
but I’d rather not leave you.

Please Stop Stealing My Things

Last month you pinched from me a fragile mare,
the one with twinkling icy glass-spun wings.
That Tuesday night, you nabbed my bowl of pears.
You left me old and rusty nickel strings
but then you took my acoustic guitar.
Then filching my eighties punk rock CDs,
you used a crowbar to break into my car.
I puzzled when you took my pink chemise,
but less so when you thieved my walking shoes.
And then you grabbed my yellow stuffed giraffe.
You robbed me my collection of kazoos.
You nicked my mother’s red antique carafe.

I wish your thieving, dear, had not a start,
For next, I fear, you’ll steal my heart.

Moon Song

Look to the moon, my morning
darling. She has been named
chaste; barren; virginal; an untouched
goddess.

But look closer, sweet. Peer on her confectionary
surface. See there, and there,
and there – a crater. She is, perhaps,
imperfect.

Her marred flesh is too often overlooked
by poets and lovers and mothers
telling fairy tales. Thus through the years, she was our
dear one.

We confessed our sins to her, professed
our love by her, indulged in her, but
never saw her for what she really was –
a deception.

O, yes; Satan’s daughter has made fools of us
all.

Knowledge of a Plain Girl

“Plain women know more about men
than beautiful women do.” – Katharine Hepburn

Sweet boy,
I would bet my heart
that I know the color
of your eyes better
than any other girl
you’ve kissed.

I recognize the tone
in your voice. I understand
it enough to see
that you can’t describe
it, no more than you
can describe love.

And the muscle
in your hands! Your fingers
had such length,
and the color was a warm
dirt brown, tinted
from hours working
day jobs in the sun.

You were the person who
made me love the scent
of Irish Spring soap. Before
you, I hated it. When you kissed
me, I breathed through my nose
and the fragrance mixed
with your skin and clouded my mind

Meanwhile, your taste brought forth
thoughts of clear, running water,
clean and fresh. I don’t doubt
your flavor will be imprinted
in my mouth always.

For this I would put
all my money, all my love,
all my wits on the.

Yet you don’t care to know
about me,
the aching plain girl.

Inertia

In that single moment, my Chevy idling
before the thick white line at the red light,

I was an entire universe. My orbicular eyes
were planets, and my hair the twisting, meandering

galaxies and cell fibers at once, the mitochondria trickling
battery acid into my brain. Absorbed in myself, I stared

with blank, shifting gazes past the windshield,
where a mosquito dozed in the dusty

dusk sunlight. I could have descended
into sleep right there and slumbered for days in a perfect

coma. I clutched the wheel, extending
the muscles in my wrist for a taut relief,

like Plath pressuring down her stiff typewriter
keys. And the blinker of car next to me ticked away

whole suspended seconds of my life.
Spilled orange juice and pink lemonade soaked the sky,

the radio so deafening it was inaudible.
Then the light turned green and I accelerated.

Hunger

You know when your stomach
growls and the emptiness
inside seems to grow nerves
and suddenly you feel with that
emptiness?

Well, that’s how my heart
feels whenever I think of you