Withdrawal

You can only withdraw from so many things 
At one time
Particularly when
This last thing got you through
The previous ones

Held you together like
Beautiful miracle string and reminded you 
That beauty 
And miracles
Were words in your world, too.

And just as things were getting rosy again,
It's all gone grey and
Too-bright like a headache
And a constant pain in my belly
That shoots to the heart.

I don't want to train my brain to 
Stop thinking of you
When I open my eyes or close them,
When I breathe in, or out,
And I'm tired of going without,
Especially when what I'm going without
I never had to begin with.

Oh, irony, my only life companion!
Can you please take a nap
So I can heal from healing 
From all the things that hurt?

On the back of a night breeze

The night air twists into my mind
Through my childhood senses
Recalled now, quietly, sideways
And my future is unclear
And soft and gray like mist; calm
In its emptiness that soothes
The over-fullness of my past,
And my past, 
And my past.

You didn't think I'd be here,
Did we
Think at all when this began?
I sit and squeeze
My eyes shut and I wrap myself
Around the smell, wishing
Myself not to think at all
When all of this began and
Why,

For why and when are carried now
Through and out my mind
On the back of a night breeze
That came again tonight

And went.

Beside the Hudson

The Hudson stretches wide and far,
Ripples in the breeze that breathes 
New life into my war-worn bones and hot, raw nerves.

I come here when I'm full to spilling so 
I do not leak and waste 
The essence of survival that I cannot spare.

Things have been truly, deeply rough 
Like the Hudson in storms passed
These past few years. I'm strong, but sometimes I am tired

And the ships that sail her side by side
Down and up river joined
Sometimes make my soul ache, because I'm alone

And I can see a certain face
Reflected in the water waves.
Our eyes become the same, 

And then I let them go.

My life in jars

I live my life in jars that hold
Exactly 16 ounces each.
I fill them every morning and 
Drain them by the same time every
Single night.

I clean them carefully, twenty
And one scrubbing each,
And as I do I try to clean you
Too because
While cleaning, I can't help but wait
For a call, a knock, a note;

"Relaxing" in bed after, I try
Not to get sweaty again 
In the one-stream
Weak-plastic breeze of my
Two-cent-store fan

As I try to breath 
The one-thousand
Unweak-surges of my
Two-fold panic down into the jars

Knowing that
You will not come today.