AND

And I wonder
what the moon wants
as she rises,
and why I start
so many poems with “and”.
I think it’s because
I’m scared of
endings and beginnings,
but the middle
makes me feel safe
like blanket forts and
hiding in closets
which I still do
sometimes when
I miss my dad and my brother,
when the world
seems so dark it might
even swallow the moon
in one big bite.

I like the cold because
it doesn’t remind me of drowning
as most everything else does,
at times.

“Write what you know,”
they say.
Ive noticed
my stomach hurts
when Im angry and
my head hurts
when Im stressed
but knowing this
doesn’t seem to change
a goddamn thing.
Knowing isn’t enough.

I saw you
look up from your phone
and stare at me
so I stared back for awhile
until our brains called
us away to our facebook posts-
our techo-reality,
which slumped us over
and sucked out
our eyeballs
like thick milk through a small straw
until we saw
nothing at all
except stars on a screen.

And the moon
was forgotten,
the page blank,
the earth ungrounded,
the sea calling out to us
yet left unheard,
the cancer spreading,
the end of the world,
unless knowing
became doing
and we looked up
in time and laughed and
then sighed,
holding hands
through the night,
shaking with anarchy
on our mouths,
screaming into the naked dawn

together.

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