SHE DOES NOT DREAM OF IGLOOS

She asked him to meet her in Sausalito so they could sit on a bench
and stare at the Golden Gate Bridge.
She didn’t want to talk she just wanted to hold his hand.
He never came.
She thinks about how only love can make a person believe in love.
She thinks about his hands and where they are now.
Out there in the world without hers in them.
She wonders if he knows what has been lost.
There is no word for yesterday in the Eskimo language.
But there were laws that governed him.
Laws she would have complied with.
He thought she didn't understand
but she knows that sometimes words aren’t necessary
and that sometimes you can touch someone more deeply
by not touching them at all.
Now even the letters are gone.
Drowned.
She has no record of this ever happening.
What she wouldn’t give
for a haiku valentine
an everlasting hallelujah
and a lock of his hair.
She does not dream of igloos
she dreams of the way
gravity pulls a hammer towards a nail.
She would rather be a carpenter than an Eskimo.
Broken homes can be renovated
but no one would exist without history.
It is better to build things
that can’t one day melt away.
We are what we love
after all.

SOMEONE ALWAYS HAS TO DIE

At first I did nothing. I wanted to write a poem about the
intruder who broke into my car and took my yoga mat and a
bouquet of lilacs even though my computer was on the seat
beside them. I did not want to write about love, loss, or grief.

And then I realized two things.

First, I am a woman filled with sparks, shadows, and the
crimson sorrows of all of my ancestors. Love is an element of my body.

Second, one way or another
someone always has to die in the end.

* * *

Wait. How’s this for pathetic? He was two steps away from
victory when he pulled the trigger this time.

A catastrophic failure of epic proportion.

Naturally this stirs up some grief.

Or is it pity?

Perhaps this is a poem about pity.

* * *

Dig: Larceny and murder are still against the law but suicide is
just a bold way of speeding up the inevitable. In other words
don’t kill your lover when you can kill yourself instead.

But before you do, consider putting your dreams up for sale on
eBay. I would like to buy them and set them on fire. I would
like them to keep me warm when you are gone.

What else can I do? My grandiose ambitions have always been
set on love and sonance. (Arguably a catastrophic failure of
epic proportion in and of itself.)

Then again, most of us have only ever accomplished anything
because we were terrified we wouldn’t.

I don’t care about the stupid yoga mat.
It’s the irreplaceable items over which I shed my tears.
It’s the people that I memorize.

* * *

Cold comfort is an oxymoron.

I will live forever on your skin but my eyes have been swollen
too many times and I have nothing left to prove.

I already got a new yoga mat and lilacs grow wild in my
backyard but I do not know if you and I will meet again and
that pretty much sums up the ridiculous sadness of life.

Some people never learn.
I am not one of those people.

Maybe if I leave my pity in the backseat an intruder will steal
that too.

(Insert self-inflicted gunshot wound here.)

And then his brain splattered into a million little pieces
just like my heart.

I told you.

Some things happen before they begin.