A Good Man Worth Waiting For

What do you mean the storm has passed?

Swimming to the pond's center more or less, treading water, too tired to swim back, is this how it ends.

The thief I am, the killer.

Wild roses I don't mow but which don't take off the way the violets and forget-me-nots do.

The dogs have all forgiven me, I don't deserve it but that's the point, that's what they knew that I didn't, and which now I must accept, their judgment of me as a friend on the trail, a good man worth waiting for. 

She flirts during the meeting, sending text messages about yesterday's walk past empty summer classrooms, her blue dress brushing my arm. 

We are all this pain and yet somehow all this healing also.

Dad cries hearing Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, something inside justified.

What is familiar, fantastic, forsaken.

Why fuckable, why that, why now, still.

Chrisoula walks me to the river, trying to explain why she wants to go back to Canada to live. 

Oh feelings come and go but there is something that does not come and go and finding it is not the blessing you expect.  

Late but not too late I remember again that my obsession with Gary Gilmore and the death penalty is just an acute form of self-induced suffering, so brother forgive me I have to leave your death and die myself.

Remember playing piano drunk and alone, remember forgetting to be hurt and angry.

Sunlight streaming from our shared heart which is not in a body but is the cosmos.

Something is coming down the stairs, why are its feet so heavy, why does it walk so slow, what is that smell.

Can we finally look at her death, Dad is it okay now can we look at her death.

Signal fires, lover's eyes.

It's not "don't judge," it's "give up, you can't judge."

How "sexual" still requires bodies, an aesthetic, et cetera.

Chrisoula staying with me through the hard part, again.