Barely Painted Angel

The yellow sky comes to the songbird’s lullaby.

Yet there’s something inside you that won’t die.

When it reveals its ugly head whose thoughts can petrify.

I can’t help but ask why.

You call yourself a decrepit photo.

Blurred shades of dismay and grey-

That “you haven’t done anything for society to weigh.”

The truth is…

You’re a negative photograph.

Under development in the red light of age.

And even through this rigorous stage,

You’re still my photograph,

my perfect photograph.

The blue sea above is packed with ships of white.

We ride through town with javas under streetlights.

Yet that fiend emerges to ruin your delight.

As if it exists out of sheer spite.

You call yourself a messy sketch.

Lacking reason and direction-

That “this charcoal etching will never achieve perfection.”

The truth is…

You’re a premiering portrait.

Mistakes and accidents never reflect the final illustration.

And even in this early stage, if you deny all this affection,

You’re still my portrait,

my perfect portrait.

As heaven’s spark turns a shade of black.

There is something sinister that’s holding you back.

Crying into sheets on your bedroom rack.

Sinking in sorrow from your own attack.

You call yourself a broken canvas,

a chasm of taint and stress-

Begging me to answer, “why I’d settle for something less?”

The truth is…

You’re a bright painting.

A radiant colored wonder I will never mistrust.

And even if you say you’re made of lint and dust,

You’re still my angel,

my perfect angel.

Aubade to Wednesday Breakfasts

i see now my biggest fault is believing in

forever.

you would sit across from me, sometimes loudly, sometimes

not—as in, sometimes we would simply

sit and memorize the way the other chews,

how a hand grips

a hammered piece of metal.

you would sit across from me, and no matter that

the place changed, you made them all the same.

when you see a flower growing through a

crack in the pavement

every day, you stop wondering how

it persists, only notice it when

it begins to die.

you would sit across from me and i would

come up with new questions to ask you and

all this time it seems

i did not ask the right ones.

i suppose i should have let your edges blur

a little in my memory:

should not recall so clearly

the way your fingertips flexed to

hold a fork;

should not know so definitely

how your mouth twitched in a smile when i said

something funny between bites;

should not love so deeply

that i was the only person in the world

you wanted to eat breakfast with

week after week,

for all eternity.

this morning i eat breakfast alone,

and i catch myself leaning

forward as if you

were across the table. sun streams

through the window and seems to

pool around the space where you

should be.

i am sorry i looked too closely and yet not

closely enough.

Edith

If I told you the truth

about a girl I once knew,

I suppose you’d just squint and scoff.

Never has there lived a person worse off

than this tortured ghost to be.

So, let me tell you the story as she

would want you to know…

She was the image of perfect

from her head down to her toes.

She believed that all pain was worth it,

if it led to fulfilled desire,

but the number of these expenditures,

well it only grew higher and higher.

I have not the time,

to explain to you each way that she sought transcendence,

nor do I have the will to explain why

she pursued this string of events.

For today, what I’ll give

is the mere setting -

the town she grew up in,

a place much worth the effort of forgetting.

If you didn’t know any better,

you’d think everything was fine.

Sunshine is the constant weather,

never a cloud in the sky.

Only the natives know how much effort it takes to survive.

See the shadows crawling between trees?

They’re the remains of people

once just like you and me.

Do you notice how it’s the tiniest bit hard to breathe?

We know it’s because the landscape is skilled at suffocating.

You see the sand of the beach,

the line where the shore meets the tide.

We see the place where haunted victims go to die.

You speak to the people in shops as if they’re your friends,

but they’re predators waiting for the prey to be caged in.

I hope you’re picking up on this thread,

nothing is as it seems.

Everyone here,

Everyone wants you dead,

so I highly advise you leave.