9.5" x 6"

Dear Sophia,

    I've been thinking about you a lot recently. Whenever I'm happy or quiet or tired, I imagine you walking through the door or down the sidewalk, and I see you, and things feel whole, like snowfall at night or lying in the grass. There's half an Earth between us, but I can't help but think that you're still just up the hill, watching the crystal green sunset.
    And yet you're more distant than ever. I can't remember what you sound like, how you walk, the way your eyes move. I can't dream about you. I dream about everyone else (the record store girl, the angry liar, the silent redhead, my brother's ex-girlfriend, my former best friend) but never you. You're beyond simple sleep-stories. I've tried loving everyone else, and only you are honest.
    The weather has been hopeless without you. One minute it is the heat of the sun and the dusty smell of the present, and then it's thunder and dirty gray and uncertainty. We had some snow, and I thought of you.
    I remember you once said that while you were gone, there would be days where no one thought about you. You underestimated yourself. I am making sure to think about you every day, so that when you return I can tell you that you were wrong.
    Oh, how wonderful it will be to see you again! I often smile about you, and when others ask me what is so worth smiling about, I reply that they couldn't understand. How could they? They have never met you, never seen the shades of orange you paint on everything around you, never been scattered by your smiling fingers.
    I'm sorry you haven't received a letter from me in so long. I forget to send them to you. I write too many letters to you. I write them with my feet, tapping on the wooden floors. I write them with my eyes on a blank wall, and with my voice in cryptic sentences of longing. I forget which letters I can send and which must remain locked in cages and notebooks.
    I think I am more you than I am myself.

Thomas "And-The-Other" Street

i like your stripes

In a dream, we were going to college on the East Coast, and we got married, and our parents were furious.




It was beautiful.

hovering

you are the death of me
kill, kill, until
you are satisfied, my Queen
and i will
die, die, reply
yet again.

you are the cloud in me
rain, rain, reign
in cruel and vivid winter
you're the lock on the cage
and the cage and the keeper
but only i could have captured
myself.

you are nothing to me
and i am a liar
and i am a liar.

feverish

smokely, smokely
grind your way back down
find your morning hid
among the dying grass
browning with every passing ray
clackclackclack are the wings of fear
brushing dark across your cheek
swiftly go the hours
slowly die the minutes
you're all knotted up, you foolish
don't you know this needle isn't right?
clickclickclick are the cogs of an early death
scraping steel against your side
burn, burn, say the eyes
cut like frost through your fevered heart
ring out the funeral bells
call down the rain
in damp and thorny sickness
send us weeping from the field
wring out the funeral robes
spreading your mirror out
in a sick and frozen puddle
across the floor.

let us die, let us die

Room. Boy reading script on couch.

Girl approaches.



Girl: Memorizing your lines?
Boy [looking at wall, ceiling, Girl's elbow]: Trying to. [Smiles.]
Girl [frowning] Oh.



Girl exits. Boy looks at wall, frowns, looks back at script.

End scene.

concrete transformatory

the road that leads nowhere is ash in its tray
the clouds red at sunset are bleeding away
when towns roll by in glass-domino lines
i've eaten my fill, i've torn down my shrines
what once was fire and spirit and rose
is left to a postcard with vacuous prose
"slept in this morning, just like all the rest;
send love to mum, wish you all the best."
a violin-song once promised me fountains
of freedom, but gave to me only mountains
a traffic jam in the side-streets of my cells
an empty cathedral still ringing my bells
hoping in dusk for only a tithe or a heart
untraversed waters of blood there to chart
to deliver into
some kind
of liberation
from


rhyme and

rea
so


n.


so

i guess
ifoundwhatiwasn't


looking
for


and never
wanted

in these
sidewalks

and
nazca lines
across my
wind
shield


i see that
the prisoncloud lens
is shifting
north

the oceans
of green
will crawl into
gray

and these roads
will die




i
think
it's time
to head
home.