I am dreaming in Fall leaves
A rainbow burst of color
On wet sidewalks
Old women who bless me in their mother tongues
Piles of jewels- more than I have ever had in this lifetime- tumbling to the floor as I reach for something on the nightstand.
I am dreaming of morning grogginess
Of a house full of the conversation of strangers
When what I want more than anything is silence.
Remember when all there was
was silence
and how I longed for the simplicity of conversation- any
conversation- to take me away from my
Water wheel of thoughts.

Now I am happy with the gentle tumble
of words my head.
They no longer rush like
the un-dammed Colorado River
the God-damned torrent too powerful
for me to contain
until they threatened to erupt,
creating a fissure because my mouth
was too tight-lipped to speak.

Words no longer threaten to break me open.
I've known what it is to be broken, then woven myself back
together, with threads spun from
Mother spider's web

Gathered carefully at dawn when
the sunlight is so gentle
it tricks the eye into believing it might
be a beautiful day.

Days when I've hidden in my car for eight hours
because the world felt so big I thought
it might swallow me whole.

Because I'd made myself so small,
it could have.

August

This little garden bed, with its seeds of growth and change
Throughout the seasons,
Even in the deepest
Hellscapes of Phoenix summer
With the cicadas buzzing
In my ears at all hours
Like buzzsaws--
She keeps me contained.
She keeps me grounded to something beyond
Only my Small Self.
This garden with her glorious
Tiniest seedlings birthing into being
In spite of (or is it because of?) All my constant relentless feelings--
The weasels in my head that
insist:
You are broken. You are not Good.
You will always be Nothing More than This.
This garden connects me back to my ancestors. To Love in its purest form.
--To hope,
that tomorrow will grow into something I had never imagined.
She whispers in my ears at night, there is always
The unseen,
beyond the veil. The place where dreams are grown

She tells me, even despite the head weasels trying to burrow out her kindnesses with their tunneling: You are Good.
You have always been Good.
And the water that drips into the empty gardening pots I have aligned in neat rows beneath
Her tall wooden legs
Says, "hush, now. Just listen."

🌿©Omy Keyes
8|27|2019

Halo

Got some kind of halo hanging over me,
Still here.
Despite no poems having come in months,
Still here.

Have not walked in the woods
Or held a baby

Or looked at you like it was the first day we met,
Or eaten a juicy apple with the nectar dripping 
lasciviously down into my cleavage
Or taken a picture
and sent it to you at work
in months (some of those are lies)

But I'm still here. 

Still, I'm here. 
I'm here, still. 

And i will be here. still

When the time comes
that you, 
With your big ideas and your
Bright words,
And your promises, and your talk of crows

Are ready

To see. 
And I'll still be here

When 

With a Capital You

I haven’t written very many poems since we’ve been together.

And certainly not

poems to you.

It’s almost like I don’t want to jinx

us

by writing words that feel

too small to convey all that you are.

Even as I have become 
freed of the weights
that were holding
me down
I find myself longing 
for the quiet comfort
of a routine. 

As much as I longed to be set free, and now I am, 
I am held by the longing
to be anchored to something
tethered
weighted

What would happen if I let go of that longing?

Where might I float to next?
Where might I begin to fly?

--written 10/5/14

Love? Poem.

I think it's significant that I have never written a poem about you. 
You never know when it's the last night you are going to spend with someone. 
Once, I thought I knew, and we spent the whole night crying together and holding each other. 
That last line was not about you. 

I think if we knew it had been the last night, I would have cherished it more.
Instead I was thinking about how we had to get up early to take you to the airport.
At the terminal, you didn't kiss me goodbye
Even after I asked. 

Maybe that should have been my first clue that we were getting 
to the ending part.
Instead I assumed it was because I was healing from a cold sore you didn't want to catch. 

I think about how unromantic cold sores are. How pedestrian. 
How you told me to stop eating nuts.

Maybe the whole relationship we had
felt like healing from a sore.

That is not true, probably. 
You said "I won't be made into the bad guy here."

I said < "I don't want to play the victim." >
I thanked you for being brave enough to end it, said I thought
I might have been the one to do it if you hadn't. You said, "Bullshit."

I think about how in four months you never slept at my place. 
I think about your black boxer briefs
that I watched you pull up under your jeans, the morning you were getting 
ready to go to the airport, 
and I think about how it looked like you were putting on a uniform, 
A dress-code for a different city,

And I think about how each geographical location
has its own unspoken dress-code,
mostly due to the weather,
and I think about how the heavy layers of San Francisco fit you 
better than the unhindered tank tops, shorts and sandals
of the desert. 

And I think about how you're only here for your grandma.
And how this is just a stopping-point for you, 
and how I was a mile-post. 

And how you tried to get me to see that from our third date, 
But how much I wanted to make you my home. 

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