Then time stretches out and all your mad passion sleeps exhaled sighs are left from burnt bridges to matchbooks eyes roll I now know

Frienemy.

For a person with whom the whole world is open arms and potential friendship, someone who is not a friend takes effort and concentration. You have all my focus.

fuck you fuck you fuck you the effort, I put into trying to make it bearable being around as I tried to relearn a life with you in it and you cast me out fuck you fuck you fuck you I never want to see you again I am sick of trying

I guess it is time. I need to face up. If I don't talk to someone I will probably do something terrible. I am not one to hurt anyone else so, yeah. And when I think about making my pain stop, it hurts to think of what it would do to everyone else. So, time to see someone. For real.

The bridge.

As he drove over the bridge he slowed and very nearly stopped. The pain in his chest had told him to just stop, get out and jump. How close he had come to that listening to that scared him solid and he cried silently all the way to his driveway. He spent the next hour sobbing in his car, terrified by himself. He went inside and cried himself to sleep thinking of what it would have done to the woman he used to live with, the friends he did now, and the girl who had just broken his heart. One more way to use the whip instead of the carrot.

Big Steps

Laundry day, met her with my best Jolly Miller, cracked joyful jaw anyway.

Firm feelings were melted butter in a pan.


Many tiny steps to my apartment, but they felt bigger because of who I climbed beside .

Actually with her they were huge steps, like climbing Mt. fucking Everest.

Lunch; three servings, three plates for no lovers, two friends and two strangers

Four locked eyes blinked the rhythm of cooling heated hearts like a pies on a sill

We converse like dry martinis

In a place where things are made clean I drag us through mud, arm-in-arm through hedge-mazed words.

Mocking walls painted a rainbow of Easter’s bile, we looked backward onto emptiness and then spoke.

More a sigh than a kettle my anger whistled from my teeth and tried at her ears to settle.


We are crying children against the whistling.

At the Laundromat climbing Mt. Fucking Everest. Stomach drops with each huge step.
And then goodbye.


I am running hallways laid in misery and memory.

Close under Easter, nude and half frozen covered in salt, sand and sun.

Epileptic feet kick from a recent ocean floor and I swim in the October waves with her again.


Pushing through spider silk we both fled our proximity with practiced farewells.


At her arms I felt my stomach drop.

No tether here at the mountain.


Niobe is me.

She said my name. I wanted her to return to me. Love me.

Her bike. My garage. She needed a key. But not my arms.

Stone headed and half mute I bled water.

Like a fisher she hooked the keys from my pocket.


She that cast me out has gathered me up.

Arms like quilts, faces like plates we were folded and stacked breathing as one.

Teary eyes stared into our suns and our lips touched.

October turned back to July, words, and hurts lost to the thrum of our hearts.



At her lips I am climbing my steps again somehow.

The largest steps I had ever known.

All the way to Everest.



Her kisses were a tiger, she would not be caged or kept

She fled what would have been,

And as Eros ran, where I could have wept for want I smiled instead for the small death between our hearts.


A mirrored Jolly Miller pantomime stares at my tear stained ghost and a staircase lives between.


But not forever.

There are more big steps ahead.

Mt. Fucking Everest, I have found a guide.