Shams' Muse

no tickets at least but i wonder if I leave you to long it will cost me dear

Shams, someone stole your name. I heard it in the plasma, not whispered but spoken so casually just as if there were no shame at all in this interconnectedness. Shocked again at how we braid, perhaps born of the same star cluster. That must be it. Does he even know just how long you have been with me, Shams? I am haunted by people, but not interested in drama. Sometimes I think I am carrying the seeds of a child in me, and he says to me, don't be afraid, choose whatever gives more life, not less.

every morning i would miss your hands and socks and when you kiss my eyes closed and lost in sleep, open to find time's merciless creep.

you wonder how the hell you got here

fucked the dog so they say out east can't seem to get myself to sit still for even five what the hell is wrong

plagued by the itch, it's not a crime to wonder if I waste my time, more to do of no import, a talent drained and torn for sport.

My mother told me marry a businessman Marry someone who wears a suit to work and will buy you a two thousand dollar watch for your third anniversary and doesn't buy his plates at Ikea. But I'm with the band, still, apparently, Still a kind of cool that I never realize I possess. I sit cat poised in short skirts and long boots near the merch table because the heels are killing me watching the birds fly by. Not young, but almost four lives in, not as young as these kids, whose faces are without real fatigue and who are okay with Ramen noodle breakfast, lunch, dinner for a plane ticket to South America where they will royal for a semester. I watch the goldfish, thinking of that other life when I was always with the band, and kept like a pet, sleeping on floors and curled up on bar benches, my ears ringing for days. (It wrecks your hearing, but the world is mercifully more quiet and peaceful ever after). Girls in tight jeans, tight boots, black tank top uniforms, each tattooed on t...

i am smaller than i remembered and i am shrinking fast sometimes I need your shoulders to see over obstacles over and out across the plain looking for enemies circling us Injun tribes dirty Injuns on dirty grey horses the cat knocks over a glass and I am too frail too small to get out of this please the phone is out of reach and I can fit in my own pocket I can ride on a cricket

time for wishes, i wish for you. i wish for you to say it again: i love you. no wait, i am in love with you. there's a difference, right? Shams, right? i can never remember what you say to me never remember. damned memory i'm so old. at least i heard it before it was too late.

why am i so old? knees what say you? and back? allergies dripping out of my nose out of my eyes onto my shirt because i didn't think to take a tissue. there's all this pain in me from years of waiting or just bearing up with a kind of Canadian pleasntry and my head some kind of crowded closet cluttered with no particular idea no coherency in there. does one get a day off for feeling old in the bones old in the heart old in my feet?

rise, new york, rise they say the aliens are coming today according to norad. Norad? what's that I ask. I don't know. But this I do A cat, a dog, a quiet kind of life here, a quiet kind of existence, and the taps don't drip and the shower has pressure. These are little things I care for. My life has become better than I imagined and in my film, it is ten years later and we are still kissing as if those intervening years were too boringly perfect. I'll take that now until the sea calls me again, like Odysseus away from Ithaka.

Thinking you'd write, or say something, smile, wink, nod, poke, whatever it is you do, I opened up my gmail and hoped you would appear and say anything. Your name lit up. I waited. Then it went dim. I waited. I waited. Sometimes I write our names together in the bar of the search engine. It just looks good to see them together, because, we are not.

Dear readers of Shams' Muse, It's been awhile. I know. There's no excuse for leaving off my poetry project. I am sad to have abandoned it, especially since I took a look at it and was surprised how much I liked some of my own poems. Granted, there's a lot of junk in there, poems that say nothing or are so self indulgent I want to hide them under a rock. But, all the same, I think it might be a good idea to revitalize this as a creative outlet. Rachel