remembering

i.
you open your eyes
in some corner of my mind
they are blinding in the darkness.
from some distant memory
too old and vivid for imagination
you open your eyes.

my work swims before me on the page
because you are staring.
don’t you know it’s rude? but
your eyes are too bright,
i can’t stop you from staring
i cannot help it.


ii.
i would like to give you a flower
the petals grasped in my fist
it is still fresh, from where i wrenched it
still scarlet and warm and somewhat wet
i have torn it from a moistness
rather too fertile, somewhat too early
but yearning to be plucked.
still raw with immaturity i have
grasped it, and wrested it
gasping from my chest,
a root of my heart.


iii.
some people you cannot forget.
some people sweep through your life
and pass through you
with the ghost of their hand still warm
in your twitching fingers.
some you cannot bear to think
are not thinking about you.
and others you want to lie beside
within the quietude of grass
in the morning.
for some people you write poems
and with every atom of your fractured will
wish they were lies—
words welded by hopes and hallucinations
with rings and roses and the
pirouette of your pen,
words melting into ink under your gaze.

from some people you walk away
but turn again at twelve paces,
for love is a duel,
and remembrance in the sudden meeting of eyes—
the denial of forgetting
for better or for worse.

______________________

for you.