How Do You Settle?

Where would you settle, honey?
Do you find the streets too rough on your feet?
Do they get softer closer to the beach?
Do the broken shells sell you their stories
of how they washed out from the sea?
Do you find them in common with all your heart's pleas,
that despite all the trying it's always denied
and could never swim like the tears you couldn't hold in your eyes?
What about how steady the sand held your body,
with your arms on your knees as you sat hunched
while your stomach unknotted?
Did you feel all the days' poisons wash out?
What started to matter with the night coming down?
Was it how being together alone never felt any better,
or how it felt to finally get the air's salty sweet letters?
And how could you ever leave such a place,
or did you know it wasn't yours to keep,
but what you could keep were the letters locked in your heart
when you're back in the places where all the poisons get started?
Won't you tell me how you settle, honey?

Guess Who

It's been years
since I've walked in your footsteps.
I wonder if you've noticed at all
that I've passed you by
just like your times on the recliner
as I'm on my way to the garage
to do the little jobs I can't remember
ever seeing you have done.
Maybe I've learned to be so quiet
'cause you've never spoken how I could want,
'cause conversations based on jokes or yelling
aren't fit for a boy to grow.
That's probably why my words stumble
when I do try to speak,
because this man's face, and mouth,
overmatch this boy's tongue
when it tries to spit the words out.
What a filthy habit I can't kick.
I'm 22 and dying
to not have had my childhood stripped away
by the very things that strangled you,
that you passed to me when you met my mother's lips
with yours so many years ago.
Do you know? Do you have any clue
that what I carry uneven on my shoulders
is your hate, your escape, your lack of control
over the feelings you numb through your patented sigh,
that tonight it's all mine?
If tonight could be never I'd take it every time.
You take without knowing,
I break without showing,
but only for so long.
Too much to learn and do on my own.

How New Time Behaves When Old Time Lingers

Courage careened off the concrete,
like how the smile you save for pictures
drops in and then bails
'cause it doesn't want to be there either
and can't like the feel of it's skin in that air
in the place you've come to see through the people
to the cracks in the walls that don't care
how you finally see them
because courage doesn't have a place there anymore.
Once it's done bouncing off the walls,
it limps casually toward the front door
as if nothing's happened,
as if
it could
maybe
take more.
After all, time is just time
and what passes may come to bind,
but it will do what it does best:
move on and fade
like struggling winter breath.

Maybe, Maybe Not

We'd wait for it to make sense,
for it to click in our heads,
to never have met
or have met
sooner, or later.

We'll wonder about the timing, always;
the hurt, the pounding, the climbing
and falling
that put us
in our place.

You'll call, I'll answer.
We'll talk, you'll remember
why it ever
made sense in the first place.
But

we'll say goodnight, you'll go to bed.
I'll smile and breathe,
'cause the smile forgets
to remember
how when you wake up you'll be gone.

At most, a damp afterthought
we can't place
will be left,
where footprints fade
just like our hearts were trained.

One day, we'll wash out
like sea foam
on sand and
cease to exist, just like
we planned before we met.