#exahele

When forgiveness isn't an option he tells me to kiss him in the sideways field where this life meets the next. In another life, draped in blue-ish light, I did not close myself like a book--devoured. We sit silent and content, unaware that in another life we are in a crowd of hands and both of us are stuck at opposite ends.

There is a place in the dark your tremble used to live in. A small house called "vulnerability" where you used to keep all the people you binge smoked like cigarettes. All the ones you wouldn't let close. I'm sorry I couldn't be the version of me that loved you. Maybe in another life, you would have been the mountains that frame the sky but in this one my God is solitude and he tells me to move on like the firm eastern wind and so I go, I go--

The noon light sits like a cat at the windowsill and waits for the perfect moment to strike– I let it hit with eyes closed and lips parted and wonder if this is what praying is supposed to feel like, this warmth, vibrating golden. The sky was so blue I instinctively held my breath half-expecting the great cold to fall over and in me. But all that hit me was spring and her humid embrace. Relief and regret live in the same breath.

You asked me what to do with the grief, the grief that lives like a sinking ship in your chest, but I didn’t know the answer so I gave you a cigarette and named it Savior. I gave you these two hands, this muddy mouth. I called them gospel, I called them light.

I am the pear tree, the yawning sunrise– I am not a brick in your sad house, I am not a rug you may thrust your feet upon when you feel dirty. When I was little my mother, mountain of mountains would tell me: keep your colors muted, the men, they will find all the vivid reds, the sunny yellows –all that living expanding light inside of you and they will consume it. And I said: no mother, I will die first.

Can you write a poem about almosts?