There’s something different ‘bout this place
As if there were two moons
Or armies of unmasked strangers
Who you know are coming soon.
The golden flask beneath your hands
Is burning golden hot.
There’s a ticking at the doorway
Counting all the time you’ve got.
12:00am
Night clock blinking angry red numbers
Go to sleep pull the covers over your face
But you are alone in your own bed tonight
And loneliness is a bad taste in the mouth.
1:00am
Maybe you’d be less lonely if you were alone
Not pent-up on the affections or the trivialities
Or worried about loving or being loved in return
Free in a body devoid of want or longing or fear.
1:35am
You take that back.
1:52am
A faucet in another room is leaking drop by drop
Night clock still blinking its numbers in warning
Pull another blanket over your hands and your chest
Realize that, no matter what, in sleep you are alone.
There’s a man who sits on his porch step
Smoking cigarettes- drag after drag.
It’s Pennsylvania in the summer yet
He smokes on by his Confederate flag.
“If the South would’ve won we’d’ve had it made”
The flag waves on and on.
I wonder if he’s ever been south of the state
Or out of this town for that long.
He’ll walk right next door to buy a new pack
Then retreat to his poor crooked home.
I’ll be sure by tomorrow he’ll be right back
To waste hours on his porch step alone.
Let’s talk about the night
You let me blindfold you
And lead you all over the yard.
How I made you taste the dirt
And threw you down in the mud.
Let’s talk about our hands
Chilled beneath our mother’s mittens
Clinging to our winter coats
Or to each other as we skid across ice.
You wrote my name in chalk
Next to yours with a heart.
I shot you in the dark
With one of those Nerf guns.
And you didn’t even flinch
When I pulled the trigger.
For Damla
Take life as big as an open windshield;
Shifting with the racing scenery,
Shouldered by the anchor of home,
Supported by a new heart and a plastic ash tray.
–
Dam’s heels kicked up on the dashboard
Dam’s smile buried in a book
Dam’s heart shattered to pieces and left
Scattered in the gravel on the I-95.
–
She wondered if someone along the way
Would recognize her abandoned sorrow
Like a page from a diary buried in the woods
And hold it tight to their pillows in the evening.
–
Her hands that reached out to hold on to him
Got lost on the way so she threw them out the window.
Palms wide against the rush of the air beside her,
She shook hands with the warm Carolina sun.
–
No more carefree winters away from her steering wheel,
No more cold nights clutching floors like they are hearts,
No more compromising love for freedom
Or pretending hearts were meant to break.
–
I gathered your love and your pain and your heartache
Where you left them on the side of the road.
I gathered your love.
I packed it back in your trunk.
The trouble with an observant mind:
You notice every fault.
Tortured whispers: feigned, unkind
And every twist of thought.
The trouble with this understanding
Very late at night
Is that these thoughts are so demanding
And dreams will not take flight.
Was that your heart beating so quickly?
Or wasn’t that his heart, out of chest, by you?
You’ve gotten so close even your pulses match.
You wanted to use your body as an oar;
His body is the boat that is sailing away.
You thought if you could hold on tight
You could stop the water from coursing.
You thought you had been holding his hand
But the blood on your fingers made you realize
How long your body had been inside of his.
If we hadn’t known it was haunted
Would the trees still be bodies pointing
Branches like fingertips amid fallen leaves and roadkill?
If we hadn’t known it was haunted
Would we still hear the voices around us
When we cut the engine to listen to the dark?
Would the leaves still fall like nooses
Or would they drift down softly like snow?
Would our hearts still sound like thunder
As they pounded in our chests?
If we hadn’t known it was haunted
Would we still be looking for ghosts
Or would we just keep driving down another wooded road?
But it was haunted
Because we let it be haunted
Because our breath flickered with our headlights
Because the woods cast shifting shadows in our rearview mirror
Because, secretly, we were waiting
To be engulfed by the mysteries in the trees
To become a piece of what we’d known to be haunted.
You hold out your hand for another card but you’re
Tired of the feud between the black and the red
And the beating background of clanking yarn needles.
It is five o’clock and already the food is crumbs and needs tidying.
A card table and a stack of books means mess but when did it
When did it get this way?
Was there snow sailing across the lawn or were you
Dreaming of street-bound ice skates behind corner stores?
It’s a glimpse of winter and you’re gliding back to
The first place you ever called home. It’s waiting.
Candy you can eat, liquor you wouldn’t touch and
All the memories of Third Street kept in dusty corners of a proudly purchased house
Roam free.
Mother dressed in church linen.
Father in Sunday light blue singing, singing,
Singing a neighborhood favorite echoed from block to block and back, back,
Back when you chased the boys behind the school without
Worrying how your life will be when you catch one.
Then there was the day when
You caught one.
So you hung up your skates and left
Left Third Street, in love.
Floating on a new happy.
But when did it get this way?
When did eight blocks turn into eighty years away?
You wonder as you hold out your hand for a card but
You can’t take a card because it isn’t your turn.
Looking down at what you’ve been dealt you only see
The black and the red.
Only hear the clank of yarn needles.
Only see crumbs which mean mess and suddenly you’re so far
Away from your future when you will
Be free of stiff joints and a heavy heart.
When you will revert back to ice skates and Sundays.
When you will take off running, running,
Running back to Third Street.
the honey house 