35 and not falling apart

Only dangling pieces and mortar rounds off my belt, well neglected, twirling into blight, because that is what happens when you are not surveying your radioactive halves, there goes a section to the sand dunes, all clubs and spades, that's ocean beach, and threading the middle my own surfer has gone and now he is disappearing into the frothy surf.


Weeks have passed since. Pods of unlikely whales, me and my sneakers wrenching away from your salt water pull, beware those riptides and under toads. And there goes the year, there goes my year unfurling from around the lampost, just another year and just another number tucked into my britches and all of the descriptives I am too drunk to seek out, I've got an engineer I'll roll into, only if he'll have me.

Here I go in front of the mirror, here I am peeling off my birthday dress, here I am curling around your absence.

It's been raining since friday... yeah come and get me I am only and always loosy goosy and four parts sideways, and mostly upside down. I hope you all can see that I have no business being rightsideup, c'mon and roll me right, roll me under

String of Sundays

I've got nothing but a string of sundays as bright and gaudy as glass beads, carelessly strung and holding tight to that forlorn ray of brightness, making my week, making my night, forged in the moonlight, melded in the sun. As sharp and intransigent as icicles against a wide open spring sky.

I've got nothing but anecdotes bobbing on my sea of metaphor, I've got nothing but plentitude and all of the acres of love that I'd gladly make, but here in the quiet layers crash away like shale into dust and on Monday I only want to weep for Sunday, weep for moments that make minutes, that make days, that make the memories, forever scalded or just as easily forgotten. Ultimately I'll have no say in the matter, everything I thought was of any import has desolved into the ether of forgetfulness and it's the odd moments of parallel and convergence that come unbidden, bringing back faces and memories, a fragment of a shared joke, a disembodied tune.

I am reluctant to record these sundays, bead by bead, such as they are, pieces of the puzzle of a day, meaningful only to me, and maybe not even so much to the engineer, special only to me. Humingbird spotted in the Euclalyptus harbinger of good fortune for only me. The half buried sail boats peeking out of the snowmelt, blue on blue on blue, mine all mine, but for his hand in mine, and our matching sunburned noses. And just as probably he is lost in his own set of clouds, so we are separate, but equal, skiing in t-shirts, taking turns pacing one another. He may be smoother than I, cutting an eloquent S into the thick sierra cement on his snowboard, his knees cocked before him, a gloved index finger a careless rutter, but I, I on a fast pair of skis am twin blades on the wind, strumming all the right chords of my rebel nature, there under the radiant sunlight in my t-shirt and my lover's pants, just after mountain bucks her last mogul and yields to me, tuck the poles, knees work, plunge downhill, gather speed, sweep past the engineer, surrender everything but instinct, fly with your feet on the ground down the mountain, with the last day of April shining all around you, fly, your legs are in revolt, but jesus it feels so free, and christ you feel lovely, and you're wildly in love, and it shows, so you show off a little and wind up ass over tea kettle in the lift line, but nobody minds, and make out impervious to runny noses. We're all giddy on sunshine, I've got the sunburn to prove it.

I think it's cheating a little to write it out, and I haven't even begun to chronicle to the previous sunday with the whales and the real estate, or the sunday prior driving through sheets of rain to Monterrey and jellyfish and sea otters, I am just suspicious enough to let those precious baubles burp on their own time, if they come at all, if years from now the engineer is but a blip in my history, if I can recall the quality of sunlight but not his name. Loving and living such interdependent fickle things, we are such fickle, fickle creatures, slaves to a certain falutin' expectations and yet here is the man I never expected to meet, let alone fall heels over head over heels over head, and I honestly couldn't be more grateful. I only hope this string of precious sundays will never need a bedside madeleine, I am hoping that they will be our own mythology.