To the Real Parents Who Named Their Real Child: Whiskey

I have nothing to say to you.

Nectar

There is an hour in my mind

when we are like Gods

& I sucked nectar from your lips

           Remember?

I swore we’d never be hungry again.

But, now, my stomach rumbles

           Like an oubliette.

A lonely galaxy speckled 

like isolated prairie campfires

we don’t know our neighbors

anymore than we know ourselves

grunting cavemen pointing at their own fingers

& maybe it’s only this festering vacancy           Where God used to beI’ve tried to carve a purpose into it     What purpose can I have without a creator?     What meaning without a beloved?There is an hour in my mind when there was nothing as sweetas the nectar in my tongueor as meaningless               now that I am gone. 

She

She was a soul-renewing

gift from the universe

straight to my

earthbound experience

She was a newly hatched maggot

writhing under my skin

devouring life as she met it

in my most delicate places

She was unimaginable 

pen-to-poet contours deformed shadows

      Of a touch

      Of a whisper

She hurried in like hunger

and stayed like an unbreakable fast

regardless of how I feel, I was never 

      sated.

She snuck in like mist

and lingered like a rolling monsoon

regardless of the dreams I wanted to bloom-

I flooded

She was better from a distance

She was the purr of napping kitten

and the mystery of the sound

Slick red nails sliding on slate

and the desperate need for it to end

She was gone before I was ready

and echoed the sound of mostly

never knowing her

at all. 

Sonja

She sees my almost tears

the lightening of letting go

from the dust on the riverbeds

begging to water my cheeks

She asks- will we ever go home again?

I dance with a crooked smile

because it’s easier to chew a cliché 

than a knot you can’t swallow

No, I say. We can’t go home again.

I was raised in paradise 

by two broken parentheses 

strangers came and held the truth of my family

spread open

dissected

An experiment in tragedy

Undigestable.

Sonja said her father touched her

Asking in a tiny voice for me 

to wipe the slate clean

What does untouched feel like?

I try to relate

My sisters were taken away

Incest was exhaust fumes in a car left running

going nowhere

Purposeless. Deadly.

Pulling back skin from innocent bones 

that now only grow

crooked.

What does untouched feel like?

How does safe taste?

Clean isn’t clean without dirty. 

Home isn’t home without homeless.

No, I say. We can’t go home again. 

Memorial Day 2021

We left Galveston for the red dirt

I ached leaving the ocean

Deep wounds in my body that never close

They bleed fresh, salty, sad.

Yet something was healing

Our blended family for the first time

Together

All chipped porcelain in our own ways

All not the shapes we were expected to be

Yet, together

Then

A man sideswiped our bubble

I revved to 90

Knowing we had to get his license plate

Understanding he was running from his mistake

Finally, he pulled over and my someday wife,

Said No.

What he did to us was not okay.

I turned to ask our children

If they were okay

Assuming they’ve ever known “okay”

Assuming I was okay enough for them to say they were not. 

Slowly, I recognized, my goal will never be to protect my wife or children 

Because, I know I never can

But to be a person they can say when they are not okay

And for each of them to know, 

I will defend our bubble.

We are Gods With Our Senses

we are gods with our senses

judging what 

looksgood feelsgood isgood 

from what does and is not

all roads leading to evolution

however winding they seem

we have every right to grow however the sun awakens us

and find a water source even in the hardest rock

I have stumbled on many rocks

in some bitter moments

I have known the bite of a thousand dirty hands on my tongue,

silencing where they touched

touching where I hid

forgetting to feel the pleasant things

that hadn't left yet

still feeling the invasions

that were long gone

this morning I looked through blinds

and in that half-inch second,

the whole world was one blue sky

I don't have a point if you're waiting

this is a poem about the way we censor our joy

& our lives together

but I’m stumbling

the lines between brilliant and distasteful overlap

we are that flavor

I know it's a cliché but I don't love anyone as much

as those willing to cut me up

those able to say 

they see through the façade

and love me anyway

I don't have a point if you're waiting

I think we should give love lost a proper burial

burn it like an offering of gratitude, 

to any eyes searching the sky for hope

Yes, Virginia, connections are tenable

and yet tentative in every moment

she asked me, calm as you like,

If I remembered when we were dinosaurs together

I pulled her into myself

and split my ribcage to nestle her in

I discovered in her midnight fingertips-we are all the fingers of the same god's hands

I discovered we are all

remembering how to live for the first time.

and yet again in every moment

and I never wrote a poem as true

as the scream I gave with my first breath

so, if life's worth comes from honest pain,

I will accept nothing less

Apodidae

we locked together
like we were drowning
in a feeling of captain ej smith helplessness
you sighed my name, saying
maybe the ocean is just another sky
as you pulled wings from my spine

this morning baby chimney swifts
faced a dilemma akin
born to a family of acrobats, they
peered over fascia and felt
fly or fall.
ecstatically, emphatically, they
pumped the earth gone.

so grounded I tried to be
from aster to zinnia, you pulled my number
as if you planted it when sappho roamed
(you, the hurdy to my gurdy)
this dance I've corrected,
cranked and sped
has me stumbling now-
my flight-useless legs and feet
rendered inimical.
I miss a horizon I've never known,
a feeling of ej smith helplessness

see, the sweet swept-back swifts
are born
obliged to rise