when does an 'i love you' die?
how many years later is the expiration date?
or can i still hold you in check for
what you said three years ago,
five years ago, when you said forever?
i was a rock, a solid foundation of
hope and encouragement,
and you ranged wide around me.
you were an explosion of youth and power,
and i was a basalt tower,
high and black and irreproachable.
when did those words, when did
that look in your eyes become
out of date? when did you lose responsibility
for coming home to the girl who waited,
who watched and waited and stayed
in one place but never stagnated?
oh, you are so happy now,
and probably never think of me,
and all i can do is wish that
i could remind you of those words
and those promises that youth
made in heat, and time made you forget.

i do nothing.
i dream loudly, all but waking the neighbors
with television gameshows, stacks of coins,
rooms full of mirrors and fire.
i do nothing,
sinning gently against bigger dreams of
wealth and success and productivity
and the american idea of democracy.
i do nothing,
leaving little words on pages that
no one ever reads because what exactly
is the point of saying it out loud?
i do nothing.
i read books, write poorly metered poetry,
and all the while keep quiet inside my skull
preserving little strength and less ambition.

i am holding myself together but
you chew right through my hands.
i am straight-laced and keep
the boning up my ribs and back,
you are bending and crushing me
under the weight of your skin.
i deserve to be loved like isolde,
precious and preserved by words
from a strong and righteous man.
i deserve that love, to be craved
like a dying man loves youth,
like a lost man in the desert
loves the mirage and yearns for
actual, full-bodied, wet water.
i am holding myself together but
you gnaw right down to the marrow.

first poem in a new place

my mouth is full of clay,
warm and wet and smooth and impetuous.
there is so much dirt here,
i am rolling in it, i am roiling in it.
i am lighting all the candles
just to sing myself pretty
to the cracked mirror face.
my skin is dry and peeling up
around the edges, the hangnails,
the papercuts beginning to show
from hard labor or self-psychosis,
who could tell.
my mouth is full of warm clay
that balls up when i speak,
collects in the corners of my lips
and fills in the cracks.
there are plenty of people in this world
with pens and typewriters and pretty words:
i am rolling in the mud,
my words are caked with clay,
my skin peels with grime
and i am seeking words in the muck
that are less pretty,
to speak the ideas i must speak.

the narrator always places him or herself
deftly
in between decades and cultures.
i am black, in harlem, in the 1960s;
i am latino, in california, in the 1980s;
i am telling the story of the ghetto,
of unionizing, of coal mines
or grape-picking or graffiti art
or a million things interesting, none of them white.
white people have
darwin, and science,
or douglas adams and the sanctity of lies,
or any of the millions
of chick lit bubblegum novels
whose timeliness never seems to evaporate.
but i don't want to write
about the burbs, about parents and how money
isn't the same as communication or love,
or another bildungsroman about
finding family, or whatever.
does dominance make you voiceless?
because white culture is THE culture,
because we incorporate everything,
are we no culture at all?

getting fierce, finding that
independence is silence is
asking all the right questions!
getting wasted, losing these
lacking battles to those
who place less value in them.
getting lost and leaving
doors open in case the one
behind me seeks them too?
getting loud, getting crass
and getting full up of
complete frustration and
lack of light but i am realizing
that i am ready, i am willing,
i am prepared and i am yearning now
for the rush of blood, the pain:
give me your tired, your broke,
your full-up ghetto that is
writhing and striving to break
each other, if not you.

utopia is dissimilarities colliding beautiful
an arching rainbow that stays, shimmering, always
in blue and clear skies; utopia is each color
cooperating, finding common purpose in each other
and blessing the world beneath. utopia is one
big house, a gigantic roof that peaks in starlight
and all the inhabitants beneath peaceful, fed
on sugar and sun. utopia is quiet, the dropping
of rain onto big green leaves, as lovers go
hand in hand down paved paths. utopia is finding
after a long search, is resting after a full day,
is knowledge of the self and the body and its place
in the wide open world. utopia is bright eyes
and warm hands, curiosity and youth and breath
that can't be caught. utopia is words
strung across a page thick with heartbeat,
a yellowed treasured paper that speaks on its own
for memory and time and love. utopia is the door
through which we all go together, a way
into heaven, a chorus climbing to the peak.

an anchor is heat, is weight, is motion
or stillness. the sun is bright but does not
reach into my heart, not at least
until its warmth is joined by your heat
your hard, heavy heat that rolls over at night,
that breathes softly and mumbles.
an anchor is reaching for miles and miles
and finding very little to hold onto,
but knowing that the real thing
the real, solid, beautiful thing
will be there waiting whenever i next admit
that i need to go home, to go home.
you are one lovely picture, a landscape
of rolling hills and an ancient sky,
a framed fireplace picture that hovers
over crackling spitting settling dying flames.
and i am an inhabitant, a figure that
barely breathes and never moves, prone
inside your captured spatial scene,
captioned in latin and sweating old salt.

i am fallow, ungrounded.
seeds float past me effortlessly
knowing that the soil here
is acidic, bleached to uselessness.
i am pale and crumbling,
individual chunks of mud
and flesh falling off my bones.
at noon i am burned by the sun.
at night i am frozen by winds.
i am sedimentary,
a block of years slowly
breaking apart in the great slow spin
of cyclical nature.
the expanse of western sky
does not please my eyes;
the wet green crush of fields
does not pleasure my feet.
i am lost, ungrounded;
waiting for a map of stars
to align, and take me home.

what am i supposed to do when the best part of me was always you
and what am i supposed to say when i'm all choked up and you're ok
i'm falling to pieces, cause when a heart breaks, it won't break even.
--the script

we've talked about the silences,
the big gaps that words can't heal
and we both know we're holding
the truth back; delicate hands
can't keep the snarling raging
biting words back for long.
it's too late to recognize
what it is that we want and
everything we've dreamed,
when gross truths are oozing
from between cupped hands and
out of pursed mouths. where
do i find a solution for a
problem i can't name? you are
so closed to me, and so far away
but it is more than this.
words hurt, and old words
fester endlessly. we are
too young, too problematic,
too pursued by money and race
and social status to see that
the light at the end of
this long, dark, damp tunnel
has run away to greener ground.

simply,
it is possible to be completely alone
in a wide world full of wonderful strangers
and be content with it.
it is equally possible to be alone
surrounded by old friends, family, blood and kin
and learn to hate yourself.
the ties between the self and others are ultimately
what binds an individual into one complete unit,
and i am wondering
when