Helium

There’s an element that makes us

Lighter than air

Fills parties with colorful joy, 

Objects of desire 

For each lil girl and boy. 

Light and floaty, easy and true

Primary colors

Red, yellow and blue 

But if you know what I know, 

You know 

What it really can do.

Silence. Restful Silence.

Sinister delight 

And I’m so exhausted 

That I just might. 

Brown Girl, with Freckles

They always told you you had skin just light enough to be high-ish yellow, a nose big enough not to pass, but to pass as beautiful and hair curly enough to be straight when required.  The sun-kissed you with a dark freckle right by that nose, your first year. So you were ok. It didn't matter how your cousin touched you, because he was a kid and you were a lil'er kid and that was just playin, right, doctor? And no one wants to admit damage of those goods before it is time to damage them. ...To forge you, the iron sword you would become, from yellow to a golden bone (Nothing matters as long as you use that murky-colored ground to create a middle space: safe, still light skin'ted)

The Rewind Machine (Pine Grove)

What I need

From our future machine 

Isn’t in your mechanics

Pedantic antics 

Those wheels and cogs don’t respond when vigorously stirred, lines blurted  

Years of scribbling to you 

and for you 

on bar napkins

Tossed in bins, 

black screens with orange font

Never knowing what the fuck you want 

Old school 

College labs, notebooks: 

every color of the rainbow 

Shit you’ll never know 

I lived for you, 

But died for me 

All for the love you didn’t see 

The truth is…

I need you here, near, dear 

in it with me and in me.  No fear. 

Pine

My branches are thin, 

but can hold a heavy load

Your snow, my wind 

and all the truth we spin 

Identical waning gibbous moons

poison bloom, ripped paper cranes  

Fire dragon blood, cool blue Neptune

In remembered kisses 

Lips stained: teenage dirtbag red 

Still I wanted you 

Wrapped around me in every bed  

Pine

My branches are bending, 

I hold a heavy load

Your touch, my rain 

In the foggy distance 

We were blending 

Dissolved 

parallel minds open  

To the swell 

When they ask how I’m doing

Oh, I’m fine… so well 

I call the shots and do them too

With all my thoughts spinning right back on you 

This circus is criminal

Soft core dreaming 

Kissing you in the liminal 

Skater boy

Sexed up man

Deep voiced baby 

Fornever mine 

Pine 

My branches are breaking 

Spilling cocktails and years

Holding back the fears 

tears that I’m giving 

you’re gently taking 

Pine pine, fornever mine. 

Alpine slopes, sharp icicles so fine 

My branches…

The Rewind Machine (opus 1, Us Undefined)

I looked up the word pine, 

Asked Siri, hoping 

she’d have only one definition, 

“fresh scented trees, often found on Alpine slopes,” 

the kind coveted by 

monied, tall Europeans swishing between pretty death traps on sticks, 

boards or wheel-free wieldy mobiles 

avoiding injury or worse: 

breaking altogether. 

I didn’t want the other definition, because if undefined, if ignored, 

I could spend another 25, 30 years, 

avoiding its tickle 

at the back of my throat. 

Its tingle at the base of my spine, intoxicating, icy, spicy kundalini. 

But looking up at you:

My pretty rewind machine 

You are the perfect height, eyes locked perfect fit, bodies entangled

perfect scent, fresh and rugged

1793 miles and less than two days

is a gap 

that changes nothing 

When I remember standing 

next to you (or laying) 

hands clasped. 

It’s pure 

like snow immaculately, immortally 

dressing those trees’ spiked jade needles, releasing winter pine’s

intoxicating beauty,

Beloved.

In this most undefined us,

I admit our tree’s other definition 

does exist 

Across language barriers, accessing freer lifetimes within us, the lifelines between us 

And so I suppose it’s true 

I opine that I pine for you…

Saudade

There’s a word in Portuguese, 

Maybe just Brazilian Portuguese…

I’m not clear. 

But I learned it last night from a man bouncing people from the Dubliner, 

An ironically named drinking hole, 

also far from its roots. 

He was 

1/3 urban cowboy,

1/3 Rastafarian,

1/3 the Sheriff yet to be shot. 

This is the word: 

Saudade

It was described as never being able 

to come home, that things will never be 

the same. 

But when I looked it up, 

Because hearsay manipulates language, 

I read something different. What it is: 

Constant longing.

As if something’s missing from what you once had or

Believe you had. 

And I thought, “FML!” as the kids type…

(no one says much of anything anymore IRL) 

What if that’s it?

What if what I left, I’d never regained 

What if: that WAS IT.

What if I once had it, whatever it was and

I can’t stop feeling its loss even if it actually

Wasn’t what I thought it was. 

Because 

When I saw you, whoa

The saudade: Faded 

No more 

what if what if what if, 

The most tolerable 5 minutes or so 

in more years than I can (will) count.

And so I accept  

That Saudade is a gift  

Because as it turns out it is more 

than one thing. 

It’s more than melancholic nostalgia, 

Less than misplaced neurosis, 

Which is why there’s no direct translation in our romance avoidant language: 

Saudade

Like us, how we were and will never be again.

…Maybe…

Because:

Of whom we are now.