245.

Seeing you changes everything.

244. My heart is the golden tip of an arrow.

It is difficult to harness anger. To survive,
I am told that I am to whistle for it
whenever the harsher weather settles in
as if it were a wild dog that owes me
its command. Anger, they say,
will burn up the rest of it.
I'm supposed to call people cruel when I mean it
and I'm supposed to take back my power
while not accidentally picking up any of the weight.
I'm not grounded. I went over the goddamn moon
and it's cold out here. Too quiet.
Speckles of light are nice to look at
but my arms aren't light years long.
Space is much larger when you're actually out here.
I was wrong, you aren't getting smaller and smaller
the further I get from the earth.
I need a cup of coffee. I need to learn another language.
Need need need. I need to run out of room,
but not like this, not in the way
that keeps everyone else from getting through.
And so my name sends you to splinters.
We leave and circle over and over,
our footprints scarred into the floorboards.
Patience has turned into something disgusting.
When I see you. I will not know what to do.

243. The portraits I draw of myself in your absence.

I would like to have less edges.
I would like to be easier
to love, or simply stand next to.
When they find the wreckage,
remember
there are always harder things
happening somewhere else,
and there is light, light,
light.

242. I dream about my lover.

We are not speaking.
I am many colors
when he appears.
First, a diner, a bar,
my front lawn. He does not give
me his voice. I do not want to look up,
do not want to see how close
our bodies are. If I do, once,

he says, You broke my heart.
I begin:
No, no
that's not the way it happened,
and that is not the way
you would say it. 
But his voice
is already gone and I
am walking down the street. He follows,
staying behind, he thinks I can't see him
and every time we are on this road,
it is erupting in green, new.
Nobody has touched this yet.
No cars, everything is growing into
where it is supposed to be.

Then, it is a new room
and he has turned into someone else.
Something more tender, more present.
We tie ourselves together with thin pieces
of silver, kiss each others' wrists goodnight.
We are afraid of waking up
and forgetting.
In the morning, he's changed again,
a small dead bird, and I go outside
and mourn to the first stranger I find.
I wrap his body in plastic,
worry out loud that his soul hasn't gotten out yet,
that he won't be able to come back
to me as something else,

but I have nothing better
to bury him in.

241. A fraction of a poem in response to the fraction of which you are able to give me, and the fraction you take away.

I am the princess
cutting the heads off the beast,
and I am the queen
with my hands in my lap,
waiting for you to come home.
No, I cannot see how we will collect
all the cups, dig our hearts out
of the earth and say, "let's go."
I see the dead in my dreams
and hang myself from trees,
hands like auroras.

240. XVI

Good,
I hope you see me as
the tower. I want you
to take one look at me
and know
what I could make
crumble.

-

(I am going to miss you so very much.)