i like a book to have its stowaways

post-its and postcards and tearaway squares with the purposefully faded butterflies and coffee cups that you can impose yourself upon

even cocktail napkins

i like when you pick one up, how there’s a falling of leaves and words defined and abandoned poems and the phone numbers of men you should not have written down, let alone stowed away

i like how these stowaways gather up against the beginning and end

and between the sewn pages ordered and re-ordered over and again

i like the semblance of self found,

added to the enterprise of another:

be it an entirely formed story

or lined and awaiting what someone, such as yourself, may have to put down

i like how, over time, what was once stark, just the two colors:

one for the page and one for the ink

pixilates and blurs

and may no longer lay flat enough on your desk

i like how, in the reconsidering, it perpetually appears and re-appears both simpler and more wrought than it once did

i like how the stowaways are sometimes cast away

and sometimes just lost

and others still that show up as replacements

i like how, given your curiosity, vanity and your sense of preservation, that you recognize such a volume for the infinitely renewable source and resource that it is

1.

i was swallowed whole by a man again

he took me in for the sweetness of my skin

and spit me out for the bitterness of my bones

2.

do not say my name unless you will loose me from this prison

unless you will swallow me whole

maybe it’s the lightning bugs

and then the heat needing to break

and flow

maybe it’s his voice in my ear like

rain on his tin roof and

soft as my skin

maybe it’s the map of more than one soul stretched taught against the dome of the night sky

and me just drinking it all in

now, finally, untethered from your grasp

all of you

with your withheld words

your fear

of my need

my silken soul

my headless rush into oblivion

and how does that make me any different from you

except, perhaps, that i am better with words

cloudy

though non-committal

filtered sunlight

and drift

it had been raining earlier

warm

humid

birdsong

and the sun lost its dress

like me

(see; drift, warm, non committal

some song and light

naked to the moment)

the other world

the one that dovetails with the one more readily known

the one that never touches down

or holds me down

and holds dreams

the one that can only glow soft

and speak quietly

and dance there at the edge of the calculated world

held smooth in my hand

concerned only with my breath as it wings inward

and out again