There Are No Fairytales

The sand girl, structured on time,
with thoughts as fleeting
as the wind. Directed, and distracted,
she is a lover with no home
that sticks.

She lingers too long, craves too much.
(She should be more grateful for her time). An
exploding flower desiring sunlight, water, constant attention
for growth; she unfurls that beauty
one slow soft petal after another. Still,
in the cold nights of September, the petals will always
stiffen, haunting a past of colors and wetness, embracing
an impossible future
without warmth.

She craves to be covered
by the words she misses most-
the symphony of sweetness from a love that is
other than. The things she craves hike in
these distant peaks without her,
they make friends with longing, and
each other. All the while time does its dirty
work, reducing us all to sand. To cravings
and memories; to an involuntary heart
simple and beating.

She always looks skyward first,
in the morning. Her body swollen
from letting go
of another dream.

There are no fairly tales
here.

Need Freedom

James Burle has been many people. Last night, at the sleep lab, he told me he once was a professor of majors. And before that, a movie star. Holding his hands in a V he moved them away from his chest and smiled. “See?” he said proudly. “Move-V.”

Now we’re waiting together just outside the hospital doors. It’s 5:45am and the cold keeps me awake, but James seems unaffected. He wears only pants and a light sweater, his fat fingers reaching for his second cigarette in five minutes. I watch him rip the filter off and throw it to the ground. A no smoking sign hangs nearby, but James doesn’t notice, his whirling blue eyes never settling for a moment. With the thin paper dangling from his lips, he fumbles in the deep pockets of the Dickeys he wore to bed the night before.

“I bought these six months ago,” he had told me earlier, pointing to the overalls. “I wear them everyday.” He finally pulls five lighters from his pockets, sifts through them until he finds the red one.

The second cigarette stirs up a string of coughs so hard I begin to cough too, forceful into the dawn, my own breath puffing up like smoke. He looks in my direction, his eyes watering. He looks away. He hadn’t met my gaze all night.

Earlier, he asked, “Are you homeless?” And I smiled, thinking of my clean clothes and the fact that I was working when we met. “It’s okay if you are,” he said, his voice sincere. “You have rights.” I thought of the mental illness in my own family and nodded, knowing that I, like so many others, was possibly one diagnosis and a paycheck away from sharing the streets and fighting for space with this man.

The wind outside erupts and sends the cold next to my skin; the sun is a gentle orange to the east. “I’d sure like a cup of coffee for myself,” James says into the shadows. “I been drinking coffee for 42 years.” He nods. In seventeen days he will be 53. He twitches his head, his hands, mumbles.

“Here is something for yourself,” he begins, hands already fishing for another smoke. I lose him for a moment in my breath. He forms his hands into a V again, moves them away from his chest. He looks my way but not at me. “You are a movie star,” he says. “That is something for yourself they cannot take away.” He laughs a little, an odd sound coming from his lips.

I am heavy with the silence that follows.

James told me they beat him and the rest of the residents at his group home. He told me the doctors are involved in a conspiracy to take away his rights. They told him he would never be discharged. I brushed it all away like dirt, shrugging him off as a poorly medicated mind. But then I began to wonder. Before, instinct had always told me whom to believe.

I’d barely batted an eye at James’ disfigured feet, yellow toenails ragged. The result of malpractice, he had said, angrily. I remembered the way he stirred his before-bedtime coffee with the pointed end of his comb—oblivious, content. Like a child. I remember seeing scars.

“You know what, professor?” I say, for he wants to be called that and I want to give him something. He doesn’t look at me, his eyes wide and staring straight ahead. I follow his gaze, realizing I have nothing to say. Or rather, what I want to say has become it’s own muddled word salad, perhaps incomprehensible even to James Burle.

We sit quietly, the ember from James’ cigarette a slight nod to the warmth between us. At 6am a white van comes to pick him up. He doesn’t say good-bye as the heavy metal door slides closed; there is no wave as the wheels turn toward the exit, the farewell plume of exhaust like a lung-filled cough. I get up, the sun an orange burn across the pavement.

Back in the sleep lab, I can still smell his skin; still see his wild eyes and thin hair. I look over the lines of the patient questionnaire that James had filled out and to the typed word, Comments. Next to that, I find a space, now filled in with his fierce bold lines, block letters that eerily mimic my own: NEED FREEDOM.

Written so hard the pen nearly pushed through the page.

All Day, In Love

There are humans waking up today
in love, sleepy smiles, sliding skin, lips wet with still
dreams, pale thighs, un
refusing.

Remind me what it feels like?

Running wildly through a seething summer
rainstorm, splashing up sentiments,
of past lovers, dancing in a puddle the size of
Denver. In the baking city streets are
people still like poems?

Sad innuendos, cool alliterations, caving metaphors that
unbuckle all but the most
determined among us. Do we not fall in love
with these passing faces, even for a second?

Floating by like dandelion duff, humans,
eclipsing some of the worry of living,
thick with their own personal forests; individual
worlds, spinning,
desiring, to crawl inside,
turn over leaves, dig in the dirt
of one other, dip our toes in those salty
rivers—the ones with the current so fast
it begs.

Meanwhile, the bees continue their rhythmic tango
from one soft, precious flower to the next.
Life goes on. But even the weeds
suffer from too much growth, all this wetness,
expanding, loosening...in the burn
of the sun the skin actually tightens, a
hard shell, it crawls off the body,
onto another
(sometimes any other) who will
accept it in one soothing cool embrace as
his or her own.

Remind me

(the light reflected in a mad whirl, that
lingers all day, in love)

what it feels like?

Fuel

You would never think
I would be this shy, would you?
Pink hands, soft words, just a
smile, she once said, you always
have that goofy grin.
Shy, like the last autumn
leaf attached to the last
aspen, holding onto holding onto holding
on but in the end
we all fall, into space, into a great
wide emptiness, into a tragedy, a
relief.

I have forgotten how to pray;
how to
kneel, how to
sing, how to
beckon reason from a
faceless god.
I have forgotten how to ask for the things I need
like food, shelter,
peace,

Wine
on Friday and the air is already full.
From my first floor flat I listen
to the leaves scurry about the porch,
scraping like fingernails
on wood, moving about in a small
whirlwind, the trees watch this and I
imagine them growing
envy, with their dark branches and deep
roots, trees that
stood still long before my
birth.

No, I am not
as cold as my skin nor as blue
as the blood pulsing near the surface.
Maybe just a season then, the silent
collapse of the living,
The transformation to something that was
bound to happen
anyway, maybe then
I’m
Fuel.

The Horses

How could he know what lies beyond the twisted fence.
I caught him staring there, one day in November,
a statue, his wide eyes fixed on the nearby
field, the bare bones of the cottonwoods lining the
river, the angle of the sun
falling.

I imagine the sharp edge of the horizon must stand up
like a mystery, an annoying secret.
What could possibly exist beyond the hill.
What of the living things taking up root
behind that gnarled stand of trees.
The thorns of the metal fence keep him staring.
Forever
if they want.

Long ago his legs would have stretched
across the empty miles—carrying
food, water—muscles overlapping one
another, heart flaring at the eruption of
fresh grasses pounded
under hoof, and later,
at the distant idea
of rest.

These days we cage most things beautiful.
Inside four walls where nothing
can escape and never learn enough
to want to.

Does that make them ours?
Does that make him mine?
If he doesn’t belong to himself anymore—then who?
How does one decide what to own and more
importantly, when and why to own it?

I watch him, vacant in his stance,
maybe he only thinks about what horses think about.
Maybe he is content, simple, with the sun
on his back. But every so often
I see a leg twitch, a tendon, a
blink, an instant
when he is as he should be, as he
was born—wet and shiny,
a wilderness aching
in both eyes.

There is light there
nestled
like a soft stone.
There is a darkness settled in close
around the edges
but there
is
light.