I Am With You In The Morning When You Are Waking, Still Sound Asleep Beside You, Cats Curled Around Us

I would like to be no one A nameless, faceless, Shapeless form To walk through life Unknown Lost in the norm

Everything I do will blend Into the scenery, The earth, unheard And I, no one, am but a wisp, My life Never occurred

When I have gone in whisper Give me an Unmarked stone Or better yet, nothing No one was here I, thankfully, was alone

I thought I saw him walking by Out of the corner of my eye Just a trick of the light A trick of the mind It was just a little cloud Casting a fleeting shroud A phantom little lie He was not conjured from the sky But for a second I had hoped Which I have never since allowed

If I can put my hand on a maple branch And feel its frozen bark If my fingers blanch At the remnants of snow Then it must be real, it must be so

But close your eyes, meet me in Rome I have been there Did you know? Or would you not agree? If I have never touched a cypress tree?

The enigmatic me, I am the phantom bird The sphinx-like you, who exists in shadow You are effervescent, elusive You are a past life, a future creation I, well I am unearthly, a singing phoenix I am a thousand voices reshaped in rebirth You, a face shifting behind the veil One and the same, many things, unknowable If I am somebody's songbird, calling the cat If I carve a place in the hollow of a hand If I am another's, still unclaimed, still mine Then I am yours, always yours Who am I whistling to in the night If not someone as nameless as I? In the space where mirage becomes breath Between these legends, you are me, I am you

Tell me why you ban the books Which tell stories of Two male penguins adopting a child, Books that show disabled kids And gender non conforming kids And black kids whose teachers Forget their names?

Tell me why you ban the books That challenge you Because they are written plainly About plain people Who are different from you?

Tell me why books are taken off shelves For being too explicitly queer When you force children to read Passages from the bible about Rape, genocide, slavery, and a hateful god? Why is your book not banned For depicting in detail such things?

What makes your book the exception? You censor children from truths And teach them a god will hate them Because they are different You teach children to hate themselves Because your book holds no space for them

I would live here in my mind if I could If the earthly world did not always snatch me away With its incessant needing and needing Earth, why are you so attached to me?

I am in my mind today, like most days Don't say it is not a place because you can't walk there When your thoughts wander Is it through a desert? A forest? Do you swim?

Everything that has died is alive here Here is my dead friend that I used to kiss, looking well Here is the art I gave up on in frustration Here are the words you said to me in anger The dreams we dreamed together, still breathing

I walk up creaking steps from my stomach to my head The body is such a desperate thing sometimes Always needing validation and hand holding So I would live up here tucked away in the ethereal

Ashes to ashes I'll get your ashes next week And hold you as dust

The bones in my legs Are no bones at all They are leaden and heavy And it took me a long time To accept that I Needed some help just To learn how to stand

You ask me to walk Like it is easy Because everyone with Skin and muscle can do so Because though you may know The lead is not Visible to you And your understanding of me

So when you hang your head When you are short with me And I am trying to move And I am so tired And you are upset What else can I do But resign to apology?

Love and hate coexist together In one person A continuous fluctuation between Sympathy and disgust I want to ruin her I want to hold her head under water And watch her squirm

So I can drag her out Give her mouth to mouth Cradle her gasping body in my arms While I scream at her for being stupid Spitting and wiping my lips That were tainted from saving her

I hate her and I love her I hate to love her, never the opposite Never have I hated a person before And I have no reason to hate her More so I hate our transgressions I hate the wrongness we shared And the shame of it all

My hate is usually dulled to apathy The forgetting It absolves me, that forgetting It takes the two emotions and washes Them away I cannot feel one without the other

I stand with my feet In the water Letting the icy waves Bury my feet in the sand Erasing my footprints So I had never Walked here

The water that touches me Touches you It glides along your ankles And the tide rushes over us Though we stand In different oceans

When I get home My cat looks at me The same way she did Back then Only the fur on her chin Is gray now Her eyes are watery

There's a tap on my shoulder I know it's you I look behind me And all I see is the door I turn the lock Turn off the front light Going to bed without you

You're in between the sheets Your blankets are green Mine are brown Together we must be Like the earth That connects us

The salt of the sea Is on my skin I think that you can smell it That with my eyes closed Your arms around me Whispering Take me back there

My cat settles herself In the bend of my knees I wonder if she remembers you As she yawns loudly Falling asleep soundly Just as I do