Crab's End

It took years for me to lose that shyness.
It took a second for me to fall down.
It took a year for the tumor to grow.
It took a hand one touch to feel it.
It took six months to admit it.
It took one doctor to miss it.
It took nine months of fighting.
It took one afternoon to remove it.
It took away our time before.
It made those days bleed as one.
It stole your youth and hair.
It made me focus singularly.
It stole my illusion of safety.
It took you to the brink.
It made you relinquish flesh.
It stole our familiarity.
It took toxins to kill.
It made us shake.
It stole us.
It took.
And took
And took.
It made and remade and remade.
It stole, but was busted and sent to the chair.
It took years to lose that shyness.
It took months to return it.
Now it sits on our mantle like a vase.

Watching, I held your foot, still warm.
After a night of arching backed struggle.
My tears migrating back, intravenously.

Those tubes in your body, mouth, arm,
Those fluids, in your lungs, transfused,
Those moments in my memory now.

Listening, I saw you overdose, cooling.
Springing open, your eyes, quaking,
Dying at my command, you left me.

Those tears you drank via needles
were mine, your son, from our sea.
Now I sit thinking of drowned sailors.

Pneumonia waves swallowing you up.
This life preserver that sits before me,
the one with our family name encircling,
begins to curl in the pyre I built for you.

A Viking funeral, the ocean inside you,
the ship, your skin, laughter, your breath.

And breathe in the collapse of release.

I touched your face, kissed it, weeping.

I apologize for not being with you,
And run screaming through life unmoored.

I am not okay with death, with my part,
a jigsaw puzzle’s missing piece on the wharf

Cole and Lee

Spattered revisions drip heavily
Across a history of burned boots
Turning birdcages into ink spots
Bruising hearts in empty theaters

You knew time was wheeled out
Spoke-n desert equations revolve
x-pert and y-ore mines abandoned
Within new formulaic terrains

Propelling your back into a silence
Pulling a body through memory
Forcing Shivers through a lens
Emerging quarked and renewed

Some fundament precisely geared
Shifting to make the hard climb
Away from skin shed on asphalt
Like a precipitate newly distilled

Raining parables on strangers lost
Breath fogging rearview mirrors
Dusting ratios found in shadows
Abandoned by prone leafless minds

You gripped lost and found hands
Placed coins on closed road eyes
Set stones above our grave marker
Bled bytes from cracked oscilloscopes

Cell by cell revolutions revive us
From afar we watch friends ride on
Unspoken and smiled upon gestures
Bringing home the forsaken brakes

Now I stop blinking again and watch
As evolving memories speed past me
A blurred doppelganger slipstream
From when I met you and your friend