• It’s been raining for three days straight
    And if you wanted, you could still catch me shivering outside
    Each night in the witching hour, fingers tied around the cigarettes
    That you hounded me to put down.
    Friends caressed my shoulders so tightly, so gently
    When I wrote my first two poems about you
    Family tenderly kissed my cheek,
    When I wrote my eight, my ninth, my seventeenth,
    They trembled and recoiled,
    Whispered I wasn't coping,
    Thought it abominable,
    Feared the stench of tobacco hands and grief eyes .
    I haven’t cracked a book since the day they set you on fire,
    Even those I've read;
    I fear what’s inside.
    I want so much these days that it scares me.
    When I wake to light being ground through the blinds
    Late to class yet again and try to find my way out of bed,
    I get hung up in the different colors of the walls here,
    A clothesline burdened by quiet and lament.
    I want to bathe in the waters you were baptized in,
    I want the faith that you swore by.
    I want to keep your every broken promise,
    I want to repay all your unfulfilled debts.
    I want you sitting next to me on a park bench
    So much colder than the air that chilled it,
    Handing me shelled peanuts to toss out to the squirrels-
    Now the only minstrels on the benches there
    Are dealers and dependents.
    I want the soft lulls of your voice telling me
    Just how dangerous a song can be.
    I want to sing every line that has ever fallen off of your tongue.
    I want hands so much worse-for-wear shaking me awake.
    I want to lay again on the carpets that we both stained.
    I want the backpack that you carried with you to work everyday
    Tearing a crease into each shoulder without mercy or care for age.
    I want the stench of bourbon wafting from your bedroom,
    Your voice fierce and unrelenting in my ears and in my mind,
    Defeating the blare of the stereo behind us.
    I want the pack of Marlboros I stole from you seven years ago and
    Threw away.
    I want my hands to crack open in the same places yours did
    As you labored over six familiar strings.
    I want your arms clasped tight around me like a promise,
    Like the Gods we place our faith in,
    Outside an empty hospital room.
    I want our boot-soles sunk in grass side by side,
    Gazes sterner than we thought we’d ever have
    Facing the horizon upon which your mother forever lays.
    I want the sheep biting at our hair,
    The kites we crashed into the sand,
    The wooden drawer you laid me crying in.
    I want the angel-fish you nursed in a bowl
    At your bedside,
    I want the cricket you wouldn't let mother step on.
    I want the roads you walked when the Jeep broke down,
    I want the tears you wiped away the first time I saw Buckroe,
    I want redemption you told me I would have
    As we waded through my first snowfall,
    When you told me it wouldn't always be this way.
    I want to cut my hair like you told me,
    I want the locks changed back,
    I want the first Tuesday in December to have ended some other way.
    I want the shards of the glass you broke the first time I crashed my car.
    I want the horoscopes that made your blood run thin.
    I want to p***k my thumb on the knife you cut your oranges with.
    I want the gravel that laid in your driveway.
    I want to never shed the ink from the last pen you handed me.
    I want a second chair at supper every day for the rest of my life.
    I want it all and I want to find a definition for what ‘it’ really is.
    I want the Jackson River, I want the blood that ran in your veins.
    I want how much I miss you to finally be enough,
    And it will never be enough.
    It never can be.