I am covered in lists

Dragons, allergic to dairy, archery, photographs of misty days

Information I started collecting for the life

We will never have

Sometime with men I see on the highway

Dunkin Donuts, Kayaking, trips to Montana

In the moments we are driving

Side by side

Swinging, married like children

We have a whole life

Weightless and midair

How many lives have you lead of which you are

Unaware, you’ve played a part

Murdered or married in someone else mind

But I am always left lamenting these lists

I started the writing process of loving you

It was outlined

I picked out books you would like and I remember

How you like your hand held and your head scratched

Accidentally I make two cups of coffee

I’d bring it to you if I knew you at all

But you jumped off, drove away

Crossed out and erased me easily

I wasn’t written down anywhere on you

I was a receipt for something you drank quickly

Why do they give you receipts for coffee anyway?

Just crumple me up and throw me away

Written in all the little lost histories of our parents

Are the heavy sighs that would relieve the current knots

The wet pages of poetry I write in my sleep

Balled thick, stuck secure in my chest

I have told you volumes in my veins about my loneliness

It slows my blood and fills my head with dust

I have screamed silent stories about my unending love

Un-directional flowing out

Pouring, like whiskey, like water, over rocks

Wearing them down, wasting me for days

Laying me out like a river

I know I’m not new

The age of my bones settles more in sunshine

I am illuminated by what I have lost, what I can’t

Remember, it is only poetry now

I’ve lost all the stories. All that’s left is the spot on

The shelf where they stood

A gap that only reflects the feeling

Something was there and now is gone  

A boy once told me that most women were a handgun

Or a grenade’s worth of crazy

A few casualties

Some shrapnel

Scars and PTSD

In the right light and with some timing a good story

Small enough to be concealed

In a carryon or for the first few years of marriage

A comfortable amount of baggage for boys

To test their resilience, their strength and aim

But I was an Atomic bomb

Billowing up and boiling out over the landscape

No living or dead thing was safe

Now I don’t know much about the bomb

And I was too shocked at the comparison to speak

But I remember being told that a scientist killed him self

Because he propped open his nuclear experiment with a 99cent

Screwdriver

And it slipped

I do know that creation and destruction go hand in hand

And if I could split and atom

Or create enough energy to raze a city

This atomic heart of mine could power all the lights in this city

You’d have to burry me for millennia before I my love would decay

Maybe it’s the 99cent screwdriver

You are using to force me open

That is putting you in harms way

Or maybe it’s my love being used as a weapon in the first place

A hell of a thing to say

I’m not worried about you

Famous last words before

The body is found

Self exsanguinated

Are you worried about me now?

*disclaimer- dark poem not indicative of feeling dark*

Hang me like a tiny universe

Strung up inside your skull

Please not inside your chest my love

Too soft and penetrable

Keep me in your head

That hard and stubborn thing

That once told me

We were both the center simultaneously

So hang me there

Inside the center of the universe

Inside your skull

The event horizon of your hair line

Brush aside the whispers that

There is another universe next door

I have learned that loneliness loves me

And it gets jealous quickly

I can feel its hand on the back of my neck

Bending my head to the hobbies I have mastered

Because of its persistent pushing

Loneliness loves me in crowds

It finds me in wine glasses and groups of couples

And whispers so that only I can hear

“I am here, and only I will ever love you like this”

It takes my hand and tells me we are leaving early

To empty streets

Empty beds

Running showers, winding streets

Loneliness loves me obsessively

Kisses me until I can’t breathe

Holds me until my ribs ache

Wraps my up like a mess of long tangled hair

No one loves you like loneliness