TRICK

gotcha.

I'm trying to find the words
I'm looking at the digital universe
and frowning over my resolution.
I'm trying to decipher what it is - to speak
in a lower volume to emphasize meaning,
picking apart etymologies and cadence
to make sure not to understate.
I'm trying to compromise with you.
I'm trying to ignore subliminal advertising
grammatical indifference
disguised racism and homophobia:
who do you really hate?
I'm trying to teach,
to teach myself to worry about my own education
and you yours.
I'm trying to step over my own boundaries.
I can't subjugate every pronoun to fit my needs,
though I can interpret their meaning.
I'm trying to make this as painless as possible,
but pain -
real, acute, preemptive pain is stronger than I thought.
I'm trying to understand myself,
as only I can do,
all I can do is not give up.

How do you sleep so well
next to me
in the night when I am restless
when my legs kick and I roll
like a lost rock on the mountainside
I am lost forever
I am lost and locked in emptiness
in slumberless space.

How do you sleep so well
next to me
in these times there is bombing outside
someone left the television on
and my mind will not stop
turning off the reality of where we are
where we are headed
we are headed for fallout shelters
just don't leave me behind.

How do you sleep so well
next to me
my love
when I stare at you so silently laying there
wishing you would wake
wishing you would take my breast in your hand
take my mouth in yours
and share this restlessness with me
as we share everything else.

My Unsaid Everything

Now that his Mother is gone, my Father
broad chested and mountainous is reduced
to broken slabs of concrete.
He was young once, also
developed a complex, also
now yearning to speak what is locked
inside, too
and the Daughter, with the unsaid everything
ringing true
in bones and cartilage looking like
the swollen arthritic hands of the matriarch
in her bed, eyes closed and
unresponsive.

If I love you I will tell you
next time;
I keep saying 'next time'...

He is angry now
at God, when he looks up
scowling and screaming,
if fists could pound a Savior,
he would pummel.
The words have been replaced with fear -
with his boyhood resurfacing
and counting - one, two, three
instances of regret.
I am the Daughter counting
my own
but it is not spacious enough for me
in there.

I am not my Father,
and if I love you I will tell you:
this time.
I swear.

Millennial Youth

You put us up against
a wall, only affectation used to save us, but
we have all been shot off
our high horse -
we Millennial Youth do not want the horse
anymore.
You think we are disaffected,
you think we are apathetic;
we are really Indigo, and there are more to come:
you have the pleasure of witnessing
the alignment of our stars
with your world.

We are alive with a hopeful rage
that will not stop burning
through our veins.
One by one the institutions crumble,
one by one our fathers' and our mothers'
lifelong work is put out
on the streets - we are not invincible -
but our tide is rushing over
levees built by ill-conceived ideas,
reinforced by false prophets of yesterday,
shaken by the obsequies of today.

We call you out, your bluff,
we have stood firm when your backs turned
on us, only now you make eye contact.
Let this be clear: we will not break.
We will not adulterate the fate
we have taken out of your hands
and put into our own.

Each night I dream
of you and I in fluorescent.
Everywhere all around us
words trip the light fantastic -
swirling in gold and green and yellow,
like the yellow that burns through my head,
an oscillation of solar flares
back and forth
between skin aflame
and frozen just the same.

Erstwhile memories graze past my cheek,
spinning me on my axis
and you, you are standing still.
Glued to the precipice of the future
you go neither ahead nor behind
what dreams may have in store for you.
But I, I unlike my visions
pale in comparison:
I am tethered by a string
endlessly swinging fore and aft,
fore and aft.

Each morning I wake
the world falls back to grey-scale.
Eyes adjust to light
not filtered through the stars,
feet feel the full weight on top of them
and my heart sinks back down from Heaven
to rest again in the cage of my chest.

The House On Van Bergh Ave

There's a memory I have
from when I was small -
my mother's face in the sky,
behind and around her
lightning flashed from black cloud to
black cloud. I laid on the floor of our porch,
in the house on Van Bergh Avenue.

What I recall of that house,
what I knew of that family
is all a blur,
but this rings clear.
This is as true
as the most vital of my organs.
Her face, her heavenly face shining
down over me.

That is the last of my memories
of that time -
lived in dreamscapes.