Tea cups best like this,
Five or six and snowing.
Mornings hold, afternoons sneak the sun past the nurses.
By the time dark gorges the pavement steam, a nestle of cars can't keep melting away.
Always, this dream—
A bedroom at the end of my last life.
Brown-walled, wallpapered ceilings.
Two hungry mouths, one loaded mind. Fists making adequate use of time.
A phone hidden in a coat hidden in the sickness of a season splintered.
Dawn rooftops hit the windows, yellow rolls into rooms where I sit, the five-years-ago me.
She's a lurching bird misery-wrapped, all bones,
The flavor of forever--surrendered.
All four thousand square-feet of her nest squashed in the limits
Of pain that never goes away fast enough
Before the melting.
I know I had to go,
But in my dreams the tears are never too salty and I never leave. It's not bad enough. I can stay.
The laughter down the hallway makes the medicine.
An arm flings over the wall. Mother, mother.
Snow falls in Texas but never stays but I could have
Had my dreams never melted away.
