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.