the prayer cards they give you at wakes 
pile up near the stack of mail that there’s
no point in opening – you’re 90, quit
paying the bills, quit every damn thing
you don’t want to be doing with the time
you have left. you’ve had enough
worry over money and people and time,
you’ve iced bruises and wiped tears
and shit, thanking god for every 
thankless minute before your celebration.
your heart’s been broken, but you’ve
known all the greatest kinds of love,
and there’s a luckiness there that so
few people have the chance to taste at all.… Read the rest

Sometimes we begin things that we don’t know we’ll finish. We’ll start a novel on a Wednesday and by Friday we’ll have thrown it out and started playing violin. We’ll put spoonfuls of sugar in our coffee every morning until the scale tips too far and then we switch to tea with lemon, and hate it. But we just have one life, just this one, so if we want to we should write poems and learn to read music. We should have the good coffee and take a long walk. We should lay down and look at the sky and … Read the rest

Sometimes I think
of how you would have been
had I been someone else. 

We would have been friends,
just friends, surely, but
we’d connect on a level higher
than with anyone else in our lives.

We’d go from anonymous to
monogamous, eventually, and
we took an awful lot with us
when we went, but it’s okay. 

I’m safe. I’m done with my
days of leather and lace.
I’ll be anything you want
me to be, if you just keep me.

Today’s poetry prompt words were: sometimes, anonymous, and leather.