For Margaret.
Sweet.
Simple.

And we miss her.
We do.

Met her once.
Known her forever.

Everything.
She is.

Known her forever.
Met her once.
Simple.
Sweet.

I finally sat down by the river,
Flattened by illusions and latex.
My blood remembers peace.

Prayers, promises and pillows
Hold me as we skip off into the distance.
Pleased, we giggle ourselves to sleep.

What remains is simple.
What is lost is nothing.
What is healed overwhelms.

Tell him everything, don’t hold back.
There is light in leaving your door open.
Don’t worry, it’ll close on its own.

Ramone came over to listen to his father tell him about me.
That was the record playing in his head.
I could hear the needle hiss and skip and spit. Continue reading →

It’s better to play dead than to be alive during a fist fight.

Two boys, one assured, the other…not so much.
Charles held my breath for seventeen years before my lungs collapsed.
I held his much longer.

I approached the side of the road slowly.
There it was: a man dead from turning into a horse.
Now, I had heard of such things, but this quickened my breath.

The man’s head was now the horse’s belly,
And his lower body was all there,
Arms, torso and legs, crumpled in a heap on the ground, bare.
I wondered at first why he was naked but then it made sense:
He couldn’t morph into a horse with pants on.

The smell of the man and the horse cut my nose.
Morphing stinks.