desert memories: thoughts from the back of a notebook
I often write words down on bar napkins, receipts, the palms of my hand, in the back of notebooks. They are random, in different styles, of different emotions. Here is a series of that work, in their true haphazard fashion. They may not match, they may not have a theme, but they creep into my heart with the wild fervor of a summer storm.
Thoughts from the desert, memories replayed behind tired eyes…
Crowns
My fingers laced a crown
As I wrapped them around your heart
And lifted it from your chest.
You didn’t gasp in pain
But your eyes had a look of revelation
And your lips ached of memories lost.
Still you didn’t say a word
Just waited for me to kiss your brow
Before I walked away.
Flying Over Sunrise
There are certain rooms I feel small in, where my breath is the jagged hiss of cold mist in the early dark. Above the world, on a cold morning, I feel so tall. The sun burns over distant lines, a fiery trail in a dawn of orange and gold. The mist hangs heavy and low, curling into the folds of the land. It glows with the warmth of mornings kiss.
To the east the shapes of mountains and hills rise and fall, contrast and dark to the warm white of the fog between. To the west the world begins to warm slowly, wonderous and bright and brimming with life. Thick clouds carve the shapes of lakes and rivers, so white they seem to be snow spilling between the jagged hills.
Flying over the valley, I wonder.
I feel tall in a world I usually feel nothing at all.
Loose Change
Loose change makes the nosie hearts do, at four in the morning, when words of drunken starlight stumble from lips that taste of gin and bitter regret.
Broken silence is all that I have left when it’s dark and I’m alone, sitting in a bathtub you once wept in.
Moonbeams taste my skin like you had, when the liquor was too much, and the soft touch of half-familiar hands were all that kept your feet tethered to earth.
There is a silence in the wind, reminding me of phone calls that end when the sun first kisses the night to sleep. It follows me when midnight walks guide me from home.
She burns the silence into my bones, writes it in the tired flesh of my hands, a shattered song braded with moonlight and silken words.
Early in the morning she begs me to forget the taste of her lips in the dark, no more will she speak my name when the weight of the world bruises her skin.
The quiet of the room is broken by the loose change sound that hearts make, when it’s four in the morning, and she asks for this time to be the last.