pioneertown.

Purple, A Morphology

Purple/contrapuntal, suspended
between love and lost.
To window, birds have you fixed.
All day you purple, sad
to see you purple so.
All the things I could say,
but don’t (purple).
The unsaid is a fragile nest
of sorrow. Purple
untangles itself from knotted
branches. Again, I was there
only in the telling.
This too: purple.
You say, the dead don’t need
us. I say grief, like purple, is penance
we inflict on our bodies. In silt
and tannin we write contrition
on skin. I am hungry
for everything purple.
Sorrow long enough, and it all goes
purple. The man I love wants
to know purple.
Because I love him, I’m desperate
to tell. Because I love him,
I wont.

i don't want

to write about Danny, that storm
dark sky tricking LED’s in the Econo Lodge

parking lot into shine.
Me in a rage, you high

again. It’s odd what the mind holds
onto…. Weeds snarled in a chain-

link fence. A pool so empty it fills
with falling. A broken

shovel propped against a dumpster.
Sometimes we can’t know

the difference between love
and hurting ourselves

in the most familiar way.
In a month you’ll have been

dead two years. Grief is a wound
to memory, which is another way of

saying when I see you
now, you are always walking away.