Winter is winding to an end and

The leaves are like Russian Dolls in the wind

Your stepfather tried to do something

Inappropriate and

Now everything is crashing down

There have been six bad months preceding this

And cold and shivers

Every night

Hungry

And dope sick

But we pushed through the winter

And burrowed back up to the surface

From the deep

Of the underground

You explain to me in great detail

The circumference of my failures

And how I could never understand

Not even a little

But I still dream of your golden hair

And the way you smell

when we first wake up

In the morning

We were left for dead

Encased in ice

Frozen down there

We couldn’t afford to carry ourselves any further

And although we step lighter now, we are incomplete

Now I am not sure whether or not to go get coffee

At some place I’ve never been before somewhere out in The Heights

Houston is sunny today

I wonder, should I apologize for that?

I cannot distinguish the beating of my own heart

From the ringing of your phone

Which must be silenced somewhere in your back pocket

Far away from me

I am afraid you might not remember

The day we went to Galveston and drank beer beneath the carousel

And played tic-tac-toe in the diary I had given you

You had told me that you needed to see the ocean

I only know one thing for certain

Winter is over and the times we had may be lost

For better or for worse

Forever or only for a little while

I can’t tell what is good for me and I don’t want coffee

I’ve just recently learned how to help myself, you said

So how can I be expected to help someone else?

And then you do a pretty good impression of me

And it hurts so much that I almost laugh

(From collection of Poems, “Bear Down Into Hell With Me As Only A True

Friend Would… Poems 2012-2015”)