Honsetly the way it rains here when it rains makes Portland look like pre school. 
I have never seen so huge rain drops.
                                       ~Johanness Fluvio Weber on Paris downpour

thirty something nothing

on the way home, still frantically tearing off articles of colorless clothing, we decided to go to the place our friend last said "I love it here".
leaves and years cover the footprints we had secretly hoped to locate. and somehow the smells we thought to recall. & somehow we still think about all of those missing bits, possibly more in their absence.
white glints in the water of salmon carcass from this past spring. why have they not been masticated by water or a mouth? why are those the things that managed to stick around. all we wanted was a lousy bottle cap. on the way back to the car you unearthed some red birthday balloon shrapnel.
we found ourselves closer to the sky than we planned and took a slow drive back where we came from.
on the drive we used the "slow moving vehicles lane" as often as possible. people in colorless clothing have no business in cars. particularly no fast ones. and we can not be bothered to adjust to our chromatic thinking selves.
once home we ate everything worth its sugar from the cooler and called it a night. sand still in our shoes, colorless clothes piled high, tears on our sleeves, and some dusty red balloon shrapnel.  

la playa

she wrote: most lakes have a similar shape, when viewed from the shore or center. & maybe that's a little too vague but illustrates the odds that stack and hinder. & the way she looks deep into the water's slow fade, to see one more branch to sunken log. that's not palm frond or sun beam, it's dust in the water.

memo poem mepo

once you lived in Lisbon

so much more than just a summer

built pyramids of pleasures past, and those that did say never

faster, faster, faster cried the waning wake and tether

indicative of folks who study lives and loves of others

& it's not that I keep doing this

over and over

it's that i'm not doing that

over and over

never subverted

over and over

simply not mentioned

i used to be Algerian, from far external texts

stood in the arms of an ocean deeper than what we see here

worked hard for these marks, and never surrender

scathed from bow to stern, & recalling we both were

& the background sounds bleed bigger, awaiting recognition

all our backs bow thicker, stood on by some past conviction

interlocking fingers, as if conscience was cohesive

not building fortress around, rather lush gardens within them

never sure why so sure

somehow you write with so much hope. without a one of your three children. with the faith of a thousand churchless workers. so it's back to Spokane you are, or Georgia, or some place north. there is often someone to help somewhere: possibly a relative, family friend, former forensics. you hold the vial and gloves to cleanse your new life of any connections to its reflection. you know as well as the department of humyn services that they would wait there for you at the hospital, and after birth hand you both back. you to the street, and your letter-named kind to the system that can afford neither sugar nor parking spaces. this is an industry, but no one tells you about anything but you. we also forget that every one of us nearly put ourselves in your bedless. and you wake to the sunshine, some place not so far from a ship's deck, no higher than an apogee. i will practice the piano so we can celebrate, once was a standard to laugh with blood in your fists.