Your kisses
like mosquito bites.

They well up,
red and stinging
on my skin.

I itch for them.

whaaaatadork:

I might be done but I’m not sure yet. Poem by Gabriel Gadfly called Dandelion Girl.

Woah. This is cool. :D

thebarkingowl:

gabrielgadfly:

what you have

in common with the sea:

I can wash you from my body

but never from my dreams　

I love his tag “poet doodles”

I should doodle more often, huh?

You keep asking strangers
to nail your hands to trees.

You ask them to lick the blood
and the rust from your palms,
from the crooks of your arms.
You ask them to teach you
everything the world knows,
you ask them to teach you
the quiet of the spinning earth
but you hang in the sun,
and you learn nothing.

You are rolling your eyes
at the sky, thirsting.
You are drying up
and I would bring you cold water
if I thought you’d drink.

I’d wrench the nails out
and pull you back down,
I’d bathe you and bandage you
and kiss the sunburns
on the lids of your eyes,
but I know where you’d end up:
clean a week or a month
and then back at your spindly tree,
back to begging strangers
to nail your hands to the limbs,
and I cannot help you this time.

We walked among stones big as houses.

We stood in the dark of them,
in the shadows between them
and before I could stop you,
you scratched our names
into them with the little white rocks
you fished out of the crevices.
When you were done, you said
“Now they’ll know we were here.”

I wanted to rub them out.
Our names, you. The house stones
never wanted to know we were here,
I never wanted anyone to know,
because I’d stopped loving you already
and just hadn’t learned
the coward’s word for goodbye.

So you skipped among the rocks
and I stood and stared at our names,
at the hearts scrawled between our names,
at the chalky white lies you set down in stone,
thinking I could never come back here
once I learned how to leave you.

You wear your father
like a hand-me-down suit,
threadbare grey and worn.
He clings too snug,
too clenching at the shoulders.
He digs in at the waistband
he rides up at the wrists,
there is no space for you
to move and breathe.
You are larger than your father
could ever have been,
but you keep trying to fit
inside the shape of him.

Now you walk down the street
and see these people comfortable
mingling colors and fabrics
in ways you know your father
would have thought unthinkable.
If only you could take him off,
and one day, maybe, but not yet.

Your father’s pockets are full of holes
but you still fill them and wonder
why you cannot carry change.

I have unrolled a map
onto my kitchen table
and put one finger
where you are and
another where I am.

The space between
is only inches. That close,
I could feel you breathing.
I could reach out and
run my fingers through
every strand of your hair,
touch your lips and
barely need to move.

In the corner of the map
there is a guide for judging scale:
every inch a hundred miles
full of roads and rivers and trees,
the guide a sharp reminder
that you are where you are
and I am where I am,
inches apart.

September, 1918

It has been a year,
two months, five days
and this morning
since last my eyes
were full of you.

I do not know where
your head last slept,
where last you stepped,
where your body
my god save it
carries you right now.
I cannot even hear
the guns from here.
I cannot even hear them
and the post man
never brings news.

I am going out to sea.
I have stolen father’s boat
and a hundred bottles
from the milk man’s shop.

I will sail out as far as I dare
and fill the sea with them
and beg the world to spin
a bottle into your hands,
in every one, a letter to you
and a lock of my hair.

I have shorn it all off!
I have worried it out
and I have torn it out
and you may not think
me beautiful when
you finally come home
my god bring him home
but at least you will be home
and I hope, I hope safely.

If you have never known the world, how can you judge it?
Open the door to your home, step out, go out, trudge it.
March through mud and briers, scale cliffs,
stand at the tops of as many buildings and cliffs
as you can find. Find the frontier’s edge and budge it.

If you find yourself bogged in the sludge, it
is only so you can pull yourself out. Trudge it.
How will you find the grass beyond your What Ifs,
if you have never known the world?

If you have never known the world, how can you judge it?
There is wonder beyond the stutter and drudge; it
only requires that you seek it, that you sniff
it out from its burrows among the heather and thrifts.
How can you embrace life’s trial and not begrudge it
if you have never known the world?

I.
I wonder if you remember me.
You said, “Go out. Find me
that universe, and take these
with you.” Talismans.
Good luck charms like Mozart
and fifty-five ways to say hello.
Navajo night chant,
Peruvian wedding song,
diagrams of ribcages, gender,
bushmen and bones.
Gifts for a people you said
I may never meet.

It has been thirty-four years
and I wonder if you remember me.

II.
Less and less,
we call across the distance:
sixteen-point-twelve hours
between transmissions
and I wonder if you remember me.
I nearly kissed Jupiter for you,
nearly skimmed Saturn’s bright rings,
but you said, “Go out.
Find me that universe,”
so I sail out into the dark for you.

I keep a photo of you,
twenty years ancient,
to keep away the quiet
between your calls:
pale pixel, distant dot,
my origin receding,
I wonder if you remember me.

III.
I know now,
you never meant
to call me home.
Dutifully, I will go out,
but I wonder if you forget me.
I am still here, sailing.