Overcast

The desert continues its cool ascent across the days, surprising in its raindrops, in its rich greens and careful silence. I make another pot of coffee, revel in the expanses of time, let my mind wander. Watch the chickens dig through the earth with nothing more pressing to do than find the next gnat, wander through the potato plants, make the most of the summer. Do you remember when everything had broken and I borrowed your school bus to drive into the mountains and forget everything that didn't matter and what remained was tidal waves of words? 

I think I've been discovering and re-discovering the answer for years, it continues to be the same, an unmovable answer while I run and run in search of something easier to believe in, but isn't this answer the easiest of all, simply because it is true? 

Your convictions are no less worthy
just because they seem impossibly out
of reach.

Mira

Summer evenings in the desert carry a certain scent, you can feel it on your cheeks, they're all middle school sleepovers and cicada soundtracks to watching the stars fall from a friend's deck, all milkshakes at the diner and do you remember how time was going to last forever? I broke my heart against summer evenings, time and time again I let the soft voices of young men grow the song in my chest until I believed the futures they'd become, and oh, how the rift bled in my chest when they walked away. 

I sat on the back steps looking for stars through the cloud cover, the summer evening quiet, do you remember how time was going to last forever and now all we have left is poetry, I cling to it like fear clings to the back of your breath. In New York, the roiling heat wave disappears in a monsoon. I pack my bags in anticipation. 

Wonder how long it takes for a heart to heal.

A New World Order

Everything looks good, she says, smiling at your mother in bright blue scrubs, and suddenly a world of worries is wiped away. Around the country, those you love are grappling with the scrubs that do not smile, the apologetic scrubs, the we'll take it one day at a time and sometimes despite your best intentions you run out of days scrubs. They walk out of the room with their shoulders hunched, carrying your hopes like burdens.

I cannot always make sense of this world, mi amor, I will not begin to try. 

We'll take it one day at a time. 

I'll carry your burdens
like hope.

Post-It

(but no. 

if you're going to write poetry,
write poetry. 

(on that note;
write poetry.))

Unkind

A weekend disappears in wordless breaths, in avenues yet undiscovered under desert suns. Evenings are cool in the Intermountain West, forgiving, they wash you clean of your sins. At night, I stared at the sky looking for answers in the Milky Way but its wisdom was hiding under a cloud cover, perhaps that is an answer, too. Later, he sends poetry like a meal, like overripe allegory dripping between my fingers, and this avenue feels familiar. Do I walk it again, regardless? Do I tread these well worn paths, see if I can make them lead in new directions? What is it they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. 

I have forgotten to expect outcomes at all. 

The early summer slips from our fingers, the long nights and cool waters. When can I go into the super market and buy what I need with my good looks? You can feel something brewing inside of you, feel words and phrases and dreams unravel, realign. Feel a space being made where the answers might fit. 

Make space for the notion that they won't look how you expected them to.

Midsummer Night's Eve

Lore says to put seven meadow flowers underneath your pillow to dream of your one true love, but it doesn't say what to do if you live in the desert. The pagans of old always had more rain than they could ask for. I change the bed sheets. 

Perhaps this is when the new year begins, this, when life sprouts and the mountains are set aflame. Perhaps it does us no good to make plans when our hearts are buried and resting under the snow. I see little tendrils of new green grow in my chest and think I have all the blossoms I need. Happy New Year, then. 

Make of it anything you can. 

Right

Time is different here, I tell him, after the sun has set behind the mountain and a swelling moon rises in the east. Not irrelevant, but like it moves according to different rules. I wake disoriented every morning at dawn, crawl out of deep dreams in which I have moved to the top of a hill, in which I have moved to a foreign land, in which my apartment is still always the size of a shoebox, some realities remain umovable. A dentist appointment approaches and my mouth is all pyschoanalytic interpretation, is all repressed feelings and unprocessed fears. But my body is browning with the season, my smile is adapting to a world uncovered, perhaps there is light at the end of this tunnel. Time moves according to different rules even when we think we bend it to our will, the point is it moves and we move with it. 

The point is this morning I woke up from strange dreams with a mouth full of words and when they say you'll know the love of your life when you see it
I don't think they meant this
but
I do.