Susan

She says “just look at the butterflies”

I talk to dead friends through live friends

while I walk the dog

into morning dew dressed grasses, plants and flowers feeding on the sun.

My thin fingered lashes play catch with the rays grasping the light to keep it, to bring it...

it aims its arrows at my skull

I am the keeper

The wanter of want

The escaped

Returned to myself in one morning

I have ghosts standing over my shoulder and the death toll is staggering…

I evoke their names

sometimes while driving and catching a sight of birds flapping into existence

or a motorized hum in the distance

Susan…

The dead heroes lined up and coded by color alphabetically entombed on my shelf are a joke.

The true heroes are the ones who tried to hero themselves out from under the teeth of sharks and got caught up in electric wires left out by idiots to smoother some sense of a spark.

I am writing this stream of whatever as this noise of a washing machine rumbles and throws itself against the neighbors wall…

And its mechanism isn't any different than mine

These are my favorite things...

Plays and carries itself past the candle scented in rain past the ceiling fans dusty embrace past my lips parched in need of some passion or a little change

past and through the opened window to the tips of the tree…heavy branch’d and ghostly cloud shadowed.

I once wrote about an ocean

thats inside of me

Oscillating

Overflowing

And how hard it is to contain such a large body of water inside my small frame

and how I cry into the iris of the night to be released from being tethered only to get wrangled in again by my own chains.

All fingers extended at me with a smirking and knowing

And she says “just enjoy the butterflies” from her grave in ash forever sleeping in the wind of her laughter spread about the air - thinly- whispers in the ears ever so slightly - barely..

and I laugh with her- audibly

so that I may catch her wave

I never said goodbye because there was no need

because she knew all this