Anticipating china plates I dusted
like a window sill.
Smiles mashed with valleys wet
in all the love I had to give.
Your girls arrived a little late.
It didn't matter much.
All the months of building blocks
with how you loved them so.
The times you made me peel across
a parking lot or try to run and catch
a phone that only rang because the judge
decreed it from a mountain top
and made them punch the numbers in
to quell the lion's roar.
You said I didn't really care
because I sat like flakes of snow
and let them come to me.
Didn't fathom empty wombs
like wishing wells that never had a
water drop except for nauseating wine
and tears like vultures, circling,
looking for a place to land.
The shame was this: you melted
chocolate eyes with perfect curves
until they made an awful mess.
Smacked the plates of simple things
like leaving towels on the floor.
Wouldn't let them paint themselves
like Easter eggs before the mirror.
Emotion's screws were tight enough.
You didn't need to turn them more.
Looking back like dandruff
falling on my sleeve,
I wonder how I smiled.
Tire tracks upon the floor
from gurneys rolling sterile halls.
Yet another surgery that left
its stripes like badges on uniforms
I'd rather not have worn.
Cotton threads of bathroom towels
like bandages in times of war.
Their terry flesh like draperies
I wrapped around the storm.
A stump was candor's ugly face
like roaches climbing up the walls.
Its wrinkles etched in marble eyes
that felled my dreams like dominoes
or winter tombs upon the grass
that strike at night and smash the dawn.
The silent eyes that said enough.
Like bruises on potato skins
that relegate remaining flesh
to open mouths of garbage cans
that stay below the kitchen sink.
Letting someone touch me there
was overheated coffee mugs I should
have known would burn our tongues.
Garlic pushing through a press,
its presence stronger, losing form.
I guess I smiled to dig a mote
around the walls I didn't have
the legs to climb.
You started tall and dark.
Your shadow dancing in the night.
A syllable of need or two,
just worms upon a fishing pole.
The slither turned so silently
as butter in a microwave.
All at once the melt was there.
I really wanted out.
The guards of guilt
like sentries at a prison wall.
Their eyes a chunk of frozen corn
that lost its sweet but saved
the yellow, rubbed it in.
And so I always stayed.
Your presence in the morning light.
Minus music. Full of wine.
Arms and legs that might have moved
but lay like crusted crescent rolls
that apathy had dried as wheat
in parchment skies above
the growing mounds of bills.
All the moods and lipless smiles
you made me hop around.
The yanking sound of stolen love.
Tires screeching, bleeding air.
And never giving back.
"Enough" was salt that dried
with tears on countertops.
And when I left, I squeezed the tube
of all our dreams as toothpaste
running down the drain.
The slivers of your bitter words
I scraped like putty stoning up
around the lips of china cups.
I couldn't save the chips of heart.
I buried what remained.
