Poem – “When Tears Outnumber”- 1/19/2023

Dusty floors. Wide-open doors,
reentering you, from an extensive,
extended openness. A porcelain landscape
put ahead, laid out and spread
like the gravity in your heart,
and were you wondering
whose sadness you were growing?

I can connect stars
until worlds between us
are no longer this far apart.
When tears outnumber
prayers, phases of our tension,
perhaps lights will go out,
or perhaps night will merely be
an end for senseless serenity.

We were blowing kisses
for no one’s hands. To reach –
to keep, while we eventually faded,
drifting from each other’s warmth
into cold beginnings.

Alas, here you exist,
turned on, like a faucet
in all of these blanketing memories.
Sounds play with where you surround,
among makeshift shadows,
among all there is
to never let go.

Nevertheless, you did exit,
drafted in all that never erased
from a perpetual stream of fog.
With shadows brought closer,
with hauntings – those dreams that
followed me, desert me;
sundered me as I wept
on your thundering shoulders.