Prosepoetry-Elegance

we love like vagrants, ours a truck stop romance, ours all the vagaries of runaway time: us a roadside motel, us a highway map, us a crumpled collection of interstate lines. ours a vagabondish worship of the distances we drive. and all the violence of longing, is that yours or is it mine? and the vacancies in my body, are they yours or are they mine?

I thought about distance as you slept on my shoulder Curled up, open mouthed, like a baby bird. I thought of walls between minds As I looked at your hand, scarred, blunt-nailed, Fingertips accidentally dropped to my sleeve. I want fiercely to protect you, unknown Familiar child.  I want to stop being afraid And love the impulsivity The scar on your lip The small, compact body Everything you’ve ever done All of you.

it is a Tuesday afternoon and I observe the proscenium arch of your spine. I am separated from you by several degrees, a world and a half, the ornate, sweeping divide between watcher and watched (and you've never cared to break the fourth wall)

She was the song you hear and, at first blush, don't like. Well, you don't know how you feel about it so you keep listening in an attempt to discover how exactly you feel and then you reach the end of the song and you realize, you don't like it; you love it. That was Grace. She was my coworker and she was my friend. We carpooled together, I drove and she slept most of the way. "Don't get much sleep at night, do you?" I asked her, catching those drooping lids mid-descent. "Insomnia, love." She looked out the window streaked with rain; it spoke in percussive touches filling the car with quiet overcast conversation. I felt the warmth of

I. it strikes me that this woman could be a palace. I marvel at the opulent dome of her brow, her arch expression— skin like a courtyard of ivory tiles, a thousand intersecting golden lines about her head and neck. she beams from atop her sunlit tower, beatific and beautiful, spreads her arms like open doors, invites you to be one of the many who have wandered her lavish halls. II. I’ve often thought of myself as a castle: all rough-hewn stone and turrets, a temper like molten tar. my head is crowned with embattled parapets, weapons readied at the crenels. I look out from my guerites, my brattices, eyes like arrow-slits

Your wedding; you spoke your way toward it one prospect at a time; having not been the cripple or whore, you settled for singularity, no future or past, just announcement and umbra, joy in shade, soft smiting breath. How though did you put your children away? Mylar-eyed, squinting toward dawn. If your days had been counted purposefully, perhaps you would have gone off fatter, sated as a rook scavenging in the quiet instead of blindly staring out bread crumbs like a gassed canary. The shine of your boy's hungry mouth did not dissuade your long whim; to any call of loneliness the answer was a towel, clean and wet and a

I teach a caterpillar How to conceal its markings On a grapevine that grasps The trellis, trimming Chewed leaves. Bigger Bite marks upon bite marks. A rotten apple-core chrysalis Is hanging on a vine. All it ever does is change. I taught the grapevine Where to grasp the trellis. And all it ever does is want.