Wish for the stars.

"I love the stars," you said.
I loved you for that.
That and the sparks in your eyes,
The books you read and
The secret smile we shared.

I reach and grasp at straw
At the sharp grass blades outside
My door.
A present, here,
A fantasy world I'm not sure I ever wanted
Real.
Yes or no,
To commit or back down
To go through
Or be true?
Truth is, I'm just not there.
And I don't know if I'll ever be
But I'll do it anyway because
You want me to.

"I wish," you said
Or at least I saw it in your eyes
I wish too,
I wish lots of things,
That I could give up wandering nights
By the river,
Over a freeway-
L' appel du vide
Singing in my every step.

Cold.

I used to be good at everything.
I used to be that girl,
Perfect body, perfect husband, perfect life.
I could teach it all
I knew it all and could do it better than you.
Trying to love an evolution
I thought I had it,
I thought I had figured it all out
All about choice and blame and responsibility
About love, forgiveness, all those things that matter.
Fleeting inspiration, gone now with the last rays of summer
Flakes away with the last layers of Joy, Truth, and Clarity.
Holes burning bigger through the flag I carried home
Leave me standing in the snow,
Staring at my footsteps.

Out of focus.

"I never knew daylight could be so violent"
I eat, sleep, and breathe the dark.
'Do you still?'
Every day.
I want a revolution
Some kind of resolution
I feel it screaming through my
Breaking and flowing through my
Fast as the water holds me
Takes everything I have just not to.
Everything I hold and want and need just not to.
Feel like I can't hang on to anything.

Side effect.

I'm tired of dreamland.
Never know when it's gonna take me by
Surprise.
Suddenly swimming in pudding,
Breathing in mud
And screaming in little paper pieces that just
Fall to the ground.
Too dizzy to think,
Too well to let go,
I push the trees back out the window,
And the ghosts from the door
I go back to my work
Keeping this place to myself.
And through it,
Through and through
A small and perfect clarity
I know what's missing, here
Which makes me want it so much more.

Now and Then.

Home alone and wandering
Lost between the tearing sheets
Torn between sleep and waking
Walk my hall with heavy feet
Your skin, like all the sun's warmth in winter
Like melting sweet things
Like leaves and a river and everything you could ever call
Soft...
It keeps me calm, on nights like this.
I won't forget, no I can't forsake
All the wonder and belonging
Though we hold a tragic distance
Would you have it any other way?
Star-crossed in a storybook, this.
The stuff that makes dreams real
Sticks a little, to my fingers.
But I keep drifting back and forth,
Just filling the time
Between.

Just.

And we,
Who are we to judge?
Is it for us to say whether a man is right or wrong, in the end?
And where's the line, between?
Between man's place, his own authority,
And heaven's?
What's the difference in divine discourse
And less fate, more choice?
Who are we, to mete God's sentence?
Or how are we ever satisfied by the justice we so crave?
An eye for an eye,
A man's dignity for a nation
And how does it help us all the more that this man is dead?
Or that we loved eachother, all the same?
That's the difference, then:
Our forgiveness in a warrior's end, whether his shot in the dark was true.
Or our fleeting righteousness in his profane disgrace?
For he,
Even he...
Was just a man, too.

Care.

Reaching out to rescue, when my own
Boat's half-flooded
Might pull me down,
Might as well have company in this sinking ship...
What's right and what's wrong isn't so black-and-white
Toe the line between want and need
Blur the edge we're living on.
I'm a nurse, it's what I've always done
Just finding another way to care for someone else instead...
Play Munchausen-by-proxy backward and you can hear
The devil whispering between the details.