palabras

some of these sundowns the dreams somehow
pierce some of the blank blackness echoing every
single night and
i could be remembering something i lost months or years ago

could be finding it like a drawn breath in

dawn light and i fight suffocation

to return to it

recline into the chemicals of waking like
rubbing the arms of a long lost green chair before standing up
to breathe in all the incineration i've caused

it's fast and slow
like the drift of her through hallways last night
a phantom adjusting the stupid things i've placed around
the house

woke up today and cleaned it like life or death
put together the broken shelf and replenished it
with scattered minutes and hours we spent in dusty
bookshops
finding fragments of her poetry bookmarking half-read chapters in her
messy script

i'm sitting on a freshly vacuumed carpet
squinting and cleaning my glasses to discern these
words

words used to be all we had but they transformed in the grind
of years
drained of their direction she
angled them into herself
we used to sit and read to each other passionately in that shitty
studio apartment with the junk lamp and the proud
futon i purchased and pushed home in an abandoned shopping cart

it happened a little bit, later
sometimes we found a passage here and there in someone else's writing
and escaped for a minute sitting close together with averted gazes

but she stopped reading me poetry
very quietly
in her way that she has
in her voice always too loud (i called
it her portorican voice
sweetly) in her abrupt and running movements were
the silent withdrawals she demonstrated
the ones i pretended to ignore

words used to be all we had
we wore them and placed them around each others necks
and kissed them and fucked them
we strung them through the house
we machinegunned them with cocaine and
sometimes even took the ones we didn't say and
said them to each other

in my dream she's a laughing spirit
flaunting through burning doorways
destructive
troublesome
angry
i drink her fury and chase her
tearing at myself
pulling off outfits of myself
her distance mocks me
i stop chasing her because it is
the only way i can imagine that she will
find the joy i neatly removed

i wake up and clean the house
i put all the words away and they are neat (not neat
like she used to put all the words away) and square
and spilling over with her blood

i sit on the carpet and read the words she left
behind
almost none of them are complete
little fragments
i find myself mouthing my name written in her hand as if
it is her words mouthing my hand written in her name

i am still sitting here
i've been sitting here for months
not knowing how to write myself a space where she remains

i put the words back into the words and put
them back onto shelves of words with other
words of hers maybe hiding in the the words of
others that i haven't found
that maybe she hasn't even found

i know them
i don't have to look for them anymore