Rattlesnake Poem #3

I fight dirty

So I never win clean 

I learned to tie the highwayman's cutaway knot

A tangle of threads that cuts loose with a single tug

And it never takes me longer then three seconds to get on the road

The voices in my head stopped scolding me long ago

They had so many voices outside to do it for them and

It's hard to hear anyone else when 

"Survive" is tattooed across the inside of your eyelids and

Echoed in the beating of your crooked heart

Sometimes I see the girl I once loved 

In clouds but then I always turn my collar up and prepare for the rain 

She taught me that

When life is a battle where you need every ounce behind your fist, 

You never learn to pull your punches

And really, what's a few black lies for the open road?

What's a bruised ego for a horizon that stretches so wide and empty 

You loose sight of the ground? 

Rattlesnake #2

[so this is a series now]

His hat cast shadows down his jaw

His fingers were tombstones or feathers

He taught me to fly with his breath in my lungs

But didn't say falling was being untethered

And at the end, all that was left

Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west

His laughs were a song in a language

No one had ever taught me to sing

I never hoped for a second

To keep him, I wanted simpler things

And at the end, all that was left

Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west

He left like an out of tune banjo

His steps were the strings out of tune

He left like a poem about leaving

I wish I could say he returned like the moon

And at the end, all that was left

Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west

Rattlesnake's song

The taste of your skin was a sin that my preacher had never prepared me for, I adored

Your hips and the taste of your lips like moonshine and your hair I swear so fine

I could run my hands through it like water, I ought to have left you that first night

You fell right like a weight in my ribs and I hate to admit but once I let you in

I was a dead man walking, my old life shed skin like the snakes

I loved to hold, they were cold like I thought I could be, you helped me see

And I held you like your bite just might be the death of me anyway

I stayed pinned by your hands on my wrists, understanding a language

That I had never heard, not a single word and all that was left

Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west

Body Series 25

 Ghosts

The ghosts of my old lovers hide in the way I touch my bottom lip with my thumb

They whisper from dark corners at me to put the toilet seat down

I see flickers in the corner of my eye whenever I change the oil on my car

Or when I drive past exit 18 on the highway

My lovers' ghosts slip into my speech sometime

When I pull a long "ah" across my tongue just to remember how it tastes

When I slip on the word home, like one of them left it tattooed on my spine

What am I if not a cobbled together house of learned habits

And steps taken in carefully mimicked time?

Nailed together quirky ways to say hello and goodbye

The puns we liked to make about eggs draped across the gaps in the shoddy ceiling

Sometimes I remember the instant I looked at the way 

She tilted her head and decided to borrow the gesture: to take it inside and make it my own

And sometimes I just know that my love for the smell of the rain 

Was an idea someone else had, whispered to me beneath sheets

Of indeterminate color

They taught me how to make pretzels and I copied the swish of their hips

With the detail and attention of a Sofar

And we called it love and for a while

That was enough

the absence of light

It's like this: I can't see the moon from my window 

But I know she's there in the glow coming in slits from between the blinds

And the shadows cast long and lonely across the gray street

I remember other streets

And how it felt from that side of the window pane

Color bled out in night

Cold bled from my bones

My toes ached on those nights

Tonight they are covered in a smothering of soft blankets and slanted moonlight

Tonight full and cold and on the wrong side of the window and out of sight

She still draws on the part of me

That wants to howl 

My cold and lonely allegiance to her

Until nothing is left in my lungs but frozen air and nothing

Left in my heart but the memory of those lonely streets

And nothing left in my bed but my body, spent and asleep at last

Our wife: the moon

 If only I could remember the shape of the house that used to keep me warm

The walls that blocked the cold and the roof

Which asked the stars, "Could you pipe down and let them sleep?"

If only I could remember the way we lay in piles of blankets and body heat

Fingers on my skin

One window facing east, reminding me of the day to come

One west to remind me of the night still ahead

And one south so the moon could wink at me

As only she knew how we loved within those walls. 

Ethan Frome

I'm in love with the steep roofs of these cold New England houses

Their angle of bank, designed with a cool eye to the sky

Think of the snow

Soft and silent

Piling on the streets but not the rooftops

I'm in love with the way a storm sweeps in and settles down like an old flame