For a Lost Boy

You were a puppy, dearest:
with eager smiles and a wagging tail
you nipped at my heart
with your earnest
affections. I knew you
would lose those needle-sharp
puppy teeth one day, when
you would grow capable
of the full savagery your
playful growls and yips promised.
But I hoped you would never lose
that softness in your eyes,
that adoring nuzzle, and
the shamelessness to ask
for a tummyrub.
                           Oh my dear,
you are not lost--you never
ran away from home; instead,
you stayed and it's the world
that ran away. And now I have
nothing to show of the puppy love
you gave without reservation
but the faint imprint of paws
on the ragged, chewed-up
edges of my soul.

Entirely sincere and utterly ironic

written 23-11-2015

Look at my scars...

Look at my scars:
They show
where I was
--once--
Too Much;
where I
overflowed
my limits,
a terrifying
(beautiful)
excess.
Too much
flesh
too much
curve
too much;
More
than my
allotted amount
by prescription
of proportion.




written 27-11-2015

Concept Art

This is what it is like
to be sculpted
by someone else's
hand; to know that
I am made
to someone else's
specifications, perhaps
sometimes to wonder,
was there a better vision
of what I could have been?

On a Cold Night in October

There was only a pane of glass
between me and the sea
that night--thin as a filament,
barely a figment of reality.
Only that pain kept me from
the water, deep and black
below me, so many storeys
below me, so many stories
between me and the sea
that night. The fey lights of
the ferry drowned in the mists
in the Sound, rushed landward
in the Sound without a sound
because of all the storeys
between me and the sea
that night. The faerie lights
glowing in the mist,
that will-o'-the-wisp,
called deeply to me,
called me to the sea,
but the filament of reality,
the pain of a pane of glass,
thin as a figment, stood
between me and all the stories
that kept me from the sea
that night.




written 02-11-2015

Slipped by the crook of the hook

I want to glimpse
the look I mistook
when I hid behind
my borrowed book.

That look was a hook
meant to catch
in its crook
the eye of a girl
in a nook
with a book.

But it never took.