Summer ends rainless yet hopeful

Your mantra is tired
dragging itself
weary, dreamless
But it presses on like
my pedaling does
with sore knees
and a broken heart
And it does all of this
because of its truth
For nothing else
have I been more sorry

I drive over every creek
we ever floated on
and mark each log
with your laugh
your dance
your innocent fantasies
the ones I ran my canoe over
the ones I wish I could rebirth
celebrate, hold up in the firelight
with my own river rat praise song

Some views remind me of Taos
where I should have carried you
across the highest bridge
where a pueblo bedroom
turned into a war zone
where my guilt run began

All your love- a dried river bed
I dive head first and I am not afraid
of my inevitable.broken.neck.
There will be again a midnight swim
my weightless hands on your hips
my knee between your knees

I pour my drenched failure into thirsty sand bars
I give this year's drought the currents of my anger
I put my raft on your clear pure faith
And I wait to coast downstream
the way we were born to do

June

The Katy Trail smells like honeysuckle at night
and every few miles, cannibas
I wonder if my heart will train as quickly
as my body
like when I picked up a bike
looked down at my feet
and said, pedal
Lonely is a whistle now
a humming windsong
and tonight this year's cicadas
There are natural disasters
to the south and grand ol' parties
organizing to the north
but here in the center there is
nothing but a river,
a boy with a red tongue
a girl who wakes up angry
a man with new stitches in his skin
and the bluest bird
lost and displaced
un-homed away from the sea

The sun looks like it might be god

A child is learning African proverbs
A teenager is wearing a scarf like Tupac
and I have stopped making the bed

Nothing makes us change a poem like death
So that line about being glad you're gone,
today it is reborn as any icon should be

You pointed to the stars and all I saw was your hand
It's wrong for anyone to touch my scar without having seen the wound
and disposing of you while there is death here

That's the loneliest pot
crying out to one blackened kettle

When spring really arrives

And I don't mean
these teases
but when the daffodils
are all bloomed
and spring
is shouting with
yellow and hope
I will hit snooze
and bear-sleep
through it
a confused
hybernation
saying no
to the "first day of my life"
the aftershock
of December's end
will bite harder
in sunshine and green
but when it slithers away
and the coffee cools
under my insomniac eyes
I will sit
in the middle of
7 am and 7 pm
and will celebrate
12 hours times 2 times 3
there will never be enough times
to celebrate
I am better
without you

The thing is

I'd like to sit this dance out
my type A positive congruent with my OCD
waltzing, two-stepping, dipping
the O negative, with pigtails and unresolved
taking-it-from-behind issues

Truth is water, breast-stroking and
a mermaid with back arched
in a sketch of reds and taupes
her heart-shaped mouth chanting rhymes
of don't step on a crack, you'll break....

and left on the shoreline,
my blue brain calculating pi to the 100th degree
solving Miss America's world peace concerns
leaving the rest to the vampire in me
out for the taste of strong blood

Maybe this is legit

I have reclaimed
the sadness for this place
left under your pillow
for me to grip on anger nights
I have it around my neck like
a boyfriend's ring
I begin to carry holy dirt
taken from pink places
handed to me by my son
just recently as if to say
maybe this will bring it back
It sits in my pocket
bringing nothing but this:

crosses with hanging rosaries
an art gallery with a baby grand
canyons with girls on the edge
a boy climbing indian ladders
the highest point I'd ever stood from
church and god himself
whispering in the oldest of wood
the words I ignored,
Bring on the kind love

Images to end things

They are ropes
the lines between us
from eyes to necks
No, not like a noose
but a squarely tied
scout-knot
anchored by hope
seratonin
and orgasm
To swipe them
I choose a silver
blinding shine sword
cutting the last
and tiniest thread
of your rapunzel ladder
not with a hate motive
but because if I may
I'd like to breathe please