oh absolution

i watch the clear trickle
of my thoughts distill, glaze your chin, 
pearl in the corners of your mouth.


you have eaten it for weeks, 
my curled center, each fetal fear.


the contours of your face 
ache in my empty fingertips,
and i, i go back - reread, find
oh, only everything. 


missed those first times,
when you tried to bless me
in the baptism of those waters: 
confession, truth, self.


the dream, do you remember it?
meaningful, many-layered.
a friendly visit, an overhang of ice,
baseball game...


so, selfish, unbelieving.
too caught in my own petty
problems not to see


the depth of this pool, the
edges long skirted. i toedipped.
now every pore of parched skin
an open mouth, crying
for full immersion.


am i too far back, now? tide
out, i smell my regrets in damp 
stretches of long beach between us, 
watching edges of you ebb,
a listless lapping at the shore.


i realized you were sending dreams to me
but they were overloading my senses like acid - 
images were crowding into me, 
thematic strands from every dream fragment coalescing,
riffing on each other, extraordinarily powerful in being 
literal fractals at amazing depth/resolution/speed of changing iterations -
more than just fractals however, 
fiendishly clever patterns that were
ten steps ahead of my brain, sly, 
socially conscious patterns, metaphors - 
i tried to tell you telepathically that it felt invasive,
to intentionally set off these cascades 
of images in my brain, to see what would happen, 
if my head would pop off... oh the irony - 
unsui irony, like wild geese lost in the clouds


oh god i try to write of you
it pours out, and i weep.
i can't encapsulate this in my
small words, my usually tidy
boxed stanzas stack so weakly, 


the tape, the packing
all done wrong. i couldn't 
ship you this, the sorry state of me.
sore and sunburnt 


you were asleep, as well as your visiting mother,
father, and brother - i was amazed 
at how soundly asleep you were - 
i could see your head and shoulders 
in some twist of bedsheets, dark hair - 
the house was serene, there was an easy summer vibe - 
the house was shaped strangely, designed 
more for aesthetics than functionality,
but beautifully textured with odd angles, 
shiny surfaces, wood and stone, elemental


and repentant;
if it were longer, i would 
trail my hair over 
your tear-bathed feet,


kiss them and atone.










so there, today, one for the void. 
that void we love so well. 
that embraces when nothing else does.