It will get better with time...

The measure in inches of snow on my window is equal to the number of times I searched for you while sleeping.

She was split in two, once, when she was seventeen.
Marching, marching off to work at the telegraph office,
The walls rushed out before her, flaying her,
Laid open, her heart at war.
She marched through the door with bits of human flesh
Dangling like baubles from her sparsely lined Mackintosh.
Hands, hands bearing her to the back room,
Eyes like globes and gasps,
“Lie here, dear. The coat, get it off! Quickly, we might save the leg.”
See how the blood pistons hotly to fill the wound,
See how the color rises in her childish cheeks.

...more to come...

"I guess nobody loves me..."

By A.E. Bayne

Come on! I need your guidance here.
There is this book, this book I’d like to buy,
But it is fifteen dollars too much for this life.
And so my daughter follows willy-nilly, clicking rhythms with her tongue,
Moving pictures ‘round the table while I moan into the phone.
And my baby gurgles softly, soothing with her mood.
Oh baby, oh my baby, if you only understood.
I guess nobody loves me,
No one answers when I call.
Mother, father, sister, brother,
O! My back’s against the wall.
Should I buy this book with my last dime,
Take food straight from their mouths?
Fifteen dollars too much for this life,
And now it’s come to this:
No one loves me;
Nobody loves me.
I’ll just leave it all behind.

This I Wish for You

By A.E. Bayne

Close your window boards and sleep serenely under stars
that twinkle tersely in the moon’s kind charm,
disarming passersby with promises to take names,
leaving them omnipotent.

Tonight, you shine like a mellow dark diamond on black velvet.

The roar of cars on the road beyond is ocean waves
where at night,
long before,
sea stars twisted in the surf under that same glittering sheath.
Masquerading as a hyperborean night sky,
they swam with us in the everything.
Aqueous and indigenous,
the cosmos shared our skins.

Kick, stroke, and pull to the space beyond the horizon.
Will they know our names, those stars, those stars?

This is not about my heart

By A.E. Bayne

This is not about my heart.
This is not about the chunks that are missing;
It is about mending the unbearable bits of life.

This is not about sex, not about the animal;
It is about what is needed each day.

This is not about rhyme or reason,
rather simple truth, yours
and mine.

This is about the infinite power of giving.

This is about listening and feeling,
about making each day new.

Whatever we make it, whatever happens in the meantime,
Each day it is about love.

Miss America is Back in the Old Dominion

By A.E. Bayne

First, Virginia:
Virginia explained that losing is hard if you become lost in the doing.
Three months she did travel with me,
a glittering grin, shiny red face,
she graduated from far America, Lincoln.
Your questions were jewels as the cheering captured her head,
the mansion queen with her right possibilities.
Your questions were jewels because journeys are best midst life's pageant.
For days we expected to find out that June beats January -
Absolutely, America.