5/25

When we're young, we're made of impressions
pressed into our pages like flowers.
Mine a lavender, a stargazer,
You a hibiscus, a dandelion, or sunflower.

5/20

In another time, my mother was a child,
and in pictures she still smiles at me
with the childlike ignorance
of her painful death.

My Connecting Flight from Houston to Oklahoma City

The flight attendant asked the little girl in front of me if she was from "here," as we descended into Oklahoma. The little girl said "no," that she was from Oklahoma - of course, that's what the flight attendant meant, who smiled sweetly at what she thought to be childlike naivete, but it was amazing to me that the little girl had brought Houston on the plane with her. And isn't it true? That we're still a part of where we left only until we reach where we are going?

5/19

fate

It's hard to write against fate,
when the act of writing seals it in.
To be surrounded by books and swallowed
by words is to be swallowed by you
and your face, freshly stamped under
my eyelids - only to find your body
in this body of words, this stack of
letters, these texts and written
sentiments of love.
I was written and raised for you.
My stock comes well-bred: A taste
fit for your mouth, a word for you
to chew, a long sentence on which
you can suck for intense aesthetic
pleasure. Your texts, like arms,
have hemmed me in, and I plant
myself in your texts, your thoughts,
your heart, spilling my words
like seeds across your chest,
and giving in to the very idea of
fate that I have fought so long
and hard against.

4/26

my mother's voice

To battle the identity I for so long associated with the path my mother laid for me, I had to battle my mother.
"How dare you."
And so I did.
"This isn't how I raised you."
There, on the floor of the master bathroom of the condo my wife and I had bought with the money my mother had to die to give me, I pulled at my very skin, inherited from her.
"Think of what God wants."
Layer by layer, I peeled away at my own existence - my clothes, my hair, my eyes, my words - I pulled at each in turn, my arms and eyes empty-handed except for the tears and fists they had become.
"I'm ashamed of you."
I kept hearing her voice, and I had to silence it. I became a man, there on the bathroom floor, wrestling the sacred memory of my mother, the voice that haunted me after her death, the ghost of the woman who bore me, whom I felt watching me. Judging me.
"I'm disappointed."
I exorcised her. Because it wasn't her voice. The only voice that harbored fear and shame had been my own.
And then, from the last birthday card she ever sent, I could hear her voice again. Clearer, this time:
"Love you forever,
Your Mother"

4/17 (edited 7/12)

in dreams

I told him I felt the urge to write creeping over
my silent horizon like a storm sure to sweep
around me by nightfall. But then a real storm broke.
And then I thought perhaps the only world is the one
our minds and dreams create.

In dreams she dies twice - or at least he knew he'd
seen her die before, exactly this way. Or maybe she
hadn't died yet, she couldn't tell, everything being
so familiar. And if she had already died, then why
was she here, and who was dreaming her dream for her,
calling her back? He told her that we all dream other
people into existence when we need them, and he was
tired of dreaming of locked doors and hallways and
ghosts asking him "which way?" who looked too much
like himself. Needing her and calling her again.
But perhaps it was her dreaming them both after all,
even after death - perhaps it is death that creates
us, in their dreaming, and all such tenuous spaces.
Our worlds, our dreams, voluntary minds against
involuntary bodies.

In dreams she dies again. She cries this time, or
writes a letter - a letter she meant to write,
she tells me, which I'll never get to read.
If I stayed long enough with her, I'd ask her
to read it out loud, instead, wondering how it
would sound to hear her voice again.

Perhaps it sounds like the storm breaking outside
my apartment - the pelting of the rain on my roof
typing a message to his soul, my journal, the existence inside
death inside of dreams. perhaps I'll transcribe it,
word for word, or perhaps I'll ascribe it some
higher meaning only because it makes my words
that much bolder - words taking images and
thunderstorms and dying dreams
and fixing them to pages, like a madman,
seeing them as reflections in a mirror,
through clouded lenses - my creation.

Looking at these words is like
looking at my mother's face as I see her
in dreams, dying over and over
and over again.

4/11

In flight, to Chicago

He wakes half-asleep, half-dreaming, and
eyes glazed he gazes out unshaded windows
on broken clouds below:
"The plane is making its final descent."
Seatbelt lights flash on, and
he wonders how it would be if this
were the end of their descent -
that, eyes still shut, he would feel
the thud of the wheels hitting
runway, only looking out to see
houses still no bigger than thimbles,
the rivers still tributaries and
rain puddles, their lakes. And the
steps would be lowered and they
could all unfold themselves into
the winter air, setting foot on the
cold, sugar powdered, lilliputive
landscape, raising themselves to full
heights, god-like. Wading in clouds and
heads grazing the atmosphere.
He smiled in his sleep, realizing
that, for a time, their heads
really did graze the atmosphere,
riding above the clouds toward
Chicago - toward anywhere - in those
moments before the announcement,
"We're now beginning our descent,"
And the gods are sent to earth,
humbled by the fleeting proximity
to the literal heavens.

3/29