We were friends once. The woods were still dark, but they felt safer when you felt close. You were a watched clock on the wall Of this vast, old breathy house called life; A room on the other side of every door. I waited. Years passed. Silver fingers dissected the hospital hours. Time shuffled. I believed a lot of things, once. I think of you: a box of attic pearls I was always going to open. Because everyone opens you at least once. So I hear. Isn’t that what they say? What

I wrote a poem once for a man who did not deserve it, she says. He had a darkness inside, a humidity, but eyes like icewater: polluted and cold as New York snow. I turn up my collar at the chill of the place where all my beautiful words about you used to be. I wrote a poem for you once, she says, and it is a long breath out that I cannot ever take back. I sang a song once for a man who did not earn it, and she says it with a sigh that echoes like an abandoned house. I gave yo

We are none. Fled and utterly gone are we. Our ashen bones and flesh discarded lie ‘neath the ignorant earth, Feeding the emerald crown of yonder Willow Tree: Say the Five Thousand. Tick, tock, tick, tock: So rush the hours upon our endless clock, Our former glories are dazzling instants dying starry deaths. Tick, tock. Say the Five Thousand. In vain, men toil: withering upon the earth with ignorant eyes, easily scorched by accusatory light, yet restless in the col

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself i

It resonates. This moment between moments, when our compulsion to be is not comprised of wishes that we were other than we are. A moment when – however briefly – we are all that we can be. Life, reality: These things can do no more to us in that moment Than reach heavenward - their determined, stumbling hands twinkling with uncertainty - and try, foolishly, to encase us between their grubby fingertips. Pretending as though somehow we these newly-freed birds of

And then there I was. All alone, like some great hands had snatched you up from the earth, never to be seen or known again in the tangible, beautiful, human ways always lost to us when the things we love turn into shadows. I looked down, watching my shocked fingers ripple like a white fringe beneath the dark cuff of my coat as the last warmth of your touch faded from them. So soon. How long had it been? A second? A day? But I knew well enough in that moment how many millenni