-1From a quiet place with your voice in the background

- For Edward

Conversations in the bedroom
begin and
end
with your head

on my heart

twinned
fingertips
around
the edges of
my needlessly
curly hair.

I
am
arguing
with my mother
in a parking lot

skittish
about seeing you
this late
in the year

when the sky pales
to white rain
and the sun shivers -

I shouldn't think of old
beginnings; brand new
ends, defaced

yes, I tell myself,
this is a shameless
love poem

(of
sorts)

I want
the hollowness
of eighteen,

bright burning
unafraid
nineteen

cold
twenty

dreamy
twenty-one

or empty
twenty-two

I want to be with
someone
who can recall

the changed angles
in my face,

read the expression
without words
forced upon the service.

Inertia
to our bourgeois
principality.

I want
our
naked
conversations back.

To radiate
off free thought

as though
age could not
touch me.

Feel old,
coffee in my hand
car pulled still out front

continuing…

continuing…

The strain of my name
on my lips; the syllables
seem drunk,

weighty, bones
too weak
to speak.

I'll play my part,
if it means filling
the silence -

I'll coo and sigh,
lie, if I have to,

flatter the flutter
of your spine
when it tugs at me.

I'll
do
what
I
have
to

to make this work.

But here,
alone,
swollen from hope
for so long.

I see girls;
falling off the edge
of sixteen,

seventeen,
waiting for the paleness
to find them

shatter them in an all too quick motion,

I think,
yes,
I was there
surrendering,
as you do,

once,
long ago.

I want to tell them
that there's
nothing on the other side.