I Lied to My Parents When They Asked How I Lost My Car Keys
I couldn’t say
I had been in the graveyard
with a boy who
dropped out of my high school – that we
walked between the headstones and woke
ghosts, let them
climb up from
the ground onto our shoulders, rustling
like paper, kissing our cheeks with
lips that felt like moths’ feet, stretching
spider-fingers into our pockets, taking
everything that shone.
I don’t know why
I didn’t care
when I saw them swallow my keys.
Maybe I figured
the dead get hungry
or that they knew better –
and I didn’t want to go home anyway.
*
Palmistry
In high school, we joked that
my best friend would become a seasoned fortune teller
because she knew her Chinese Astrology
and how to interpret dreams.
Once, she read my palm
for kicks, I said.
I didn’t believe in fate –
and this made her laugh.
She knew I wanted her to tell me
that I really was braver than I thought
and stronger than I felt.
That I would never get old.
Instead, she smirked
and traced my life-line – a crease
that curved down to my wrist.
More poetry at Used Furniture.
Nice work. I like the moths’ feet. The soft movements between realms of the conscious and unconscious. Probably I notice this because I’ve been studying scrying and reading Modern Man in Search of a Soul & Man and his Symbols by Jung in preparation for the eighth book in my Frameshifts series. The passage between conscious and unconscious was also the subject of a recent conference on contemplation, about which I wrote a note at http://frameshiftsnotes.org/frameshiftsnotes/ContemplationConference.pdf
I loved both of these. Great work.