like i could draw down a sunset— gracefully and sweetly— i wept on the couch and pretended. i tended a garden— god i witnessed it overgrowing— then woke up nauseous. when i die there will be no limit to ones i love, i don't want to be remembered. and yet i am cautious.
when you asked me if I ruined everything, I said yes pottery on the side of concrete walls, looked sideways at the turnstile, thinking 'I'll keep walking anyway' and let it go - I've drawn the lines on all wrong and you don't fit what a shame for the storytellers who wanted it to be when the sunny side of us could never say so
it's getting harder to tell where the baseline is, which words are safe and which are sharpened, buried, long forgotten until the bass line hits. sit still and emaciated, twitch when the sirens sound. this is a prison, locking down every cascading shiver expelled from my anguished lips. i'd never claim to exist, some overly wordy glitch in a system that doesn't permit persistence; guess this is erasure's wish. i spit up an anchor, sickle, cell phone, home, a lone wish- bone, a knotted stomach, enough of my own ligaments to stitch my face shut. this is how i twist a life of priceless golden thread into shit.
This was the spring we'd pad around in slippers, a sort of soft-close apocalypse We didn’t mean to, but we grieved all our endings the same, the death of our butcher, the white hairs that framed my face
you don't have to rake my chest to come across the coals beneath I am no thing of stone more of dirt and molded clay sparked by another's breath . plant your sigil on my tongue I will show you the life there
it's been a few verses, but,
I am still your anti-systematic
poly-syncretic, nitrogen-based soul-singer,
drawn on with falsities and shaken lines,
a pumped up stellar cosmographist
building stars out of the nascent nebulae
looking for a line long enough to grab
with string-theory algorithmics in my ears;
between the sun and the seconds outside my door,
a million miles and more bearing under quantum means
and inscrutable minutiae; searching a better term for this,
we are scientists balanced on the razor's edge of a pen
and I am still looking for the formula to set us free.
in the hours where time does not seem to move,
this is a leftover thought on the table of crumbs:
to find that putting words together is an art of weaving threads,
but the colored patterns are so familiar and the repetition
something less than divine, than spirited,
in the sense that it starts and ends with the desire
to say "ecce homo" and let the readers bask;
it is an inferred ease to imagine
that the well is dry, filled with the dregs
of old stones and leaky buckets
but if the road is long the sights
will not always be unique, the scenery won't stand out,
just enough to say "at home, the trees are different."
your words are a good snack
they go down like a mouthful of glass
acrid on the tongue when you contemplate the flavor
sorry if the blood stains your shirt
At least I know I’m a mess &
won’t survive the heat
with my exploding ceramic heart
we could slice each other with truths
until our bones crack
& our bitterness is as barren as the land
& our bodies misremember contact
kilnfire eyes & all
I’ll watch you from afar
dive off white cliffs like a kingfisher
head down
talons bared
yew jaw stretched & ready to
snap
even so
I’ll watch you from afar &
like a fisher king I’ll wait for that