your eyes widen into landslides,
unraveling sobs across my chest
mouth hollowing out
spaces where we harmonize home
in a composition of lips
(that is why i never welcomed
the weight of his breath into my
   collarbone)
a transaction of language, unearthed eyelids,
an earthquake of hips where i
apologize for every fault-line
imagine every fortune-telling crease in
   palm will fold into forgiveness
(i am not looking this hard at you in order
to later etch your intelligence in stone)
we have written down our history:
shadows taint my bones in cuneiform, aging
  before stretched listlessness
watched it fall to our knees like trees in autumn, their
   dried leaves curling at the memory
   of morning, when diamond drops ran
   fluid promise through their veins
(if i could, i would wrap ribbons
around my knuckles until i was tangled
   into remembering)

Remember
the pinch of salt you toss
over your shoulder
for good luck
is a drop of the ocean kissed
too hard by the sun

But now
we are Pacifics away from dreaming

This is not a sob story
This is for too long-
watching her bloodline
trickle through the deserts of time

Remember
There are no more lullabies
nestled in the baby curls whispering
around her ears
That her eyes are islands now
They reflect everything that has
gradually drifted away from her

The cliffs jutting from her clavicles
will mock all that is suicide
There is no innocent skin
blushing peach over fragile bones here
But the memory of boys who’d
laced their blood with moonlight
as if subjecting her to the ebb & flow
of their embraces
as if all her scars gaped
like craters: a vacuum swallows
the memory of pain from
initial impact

Too many boys who call themselves artists
& claimed her as their favorite canvas
But in the morning she emerged
as vandalism from the mold
of their hands.

No, she will not forget you
but she will spend years trying
to rub this graffiti love off her birthmarks.
She will learn to live
with these veins
whose blood once sang mountain air
at the sound of your voice.

winter shouts an
almost-heaven through my window &
the breeze leaks in tendrils, covers
my bones in an icy grapevine. (perhaps
not only your presence forces awareness
on every inch of my anatomy.) can all
the first kisses you've stolen, enveloped
in the soft warmth of tender desire,
innocence sealed in crushed exhales,
keep you cozy on an Arctic night?
the movement of your feet across the carpet
makes velvet murmurs
static calculations to understand
your body in tired fractions:
your jawline, mounted on the mantra
"Life flies by like a bird that has lost control of its wings."
in your eyes, lovers are like China cabinets
fragile designs
breakables
draw you to them
in your hands, did the weight of her heart
reduce to a sun-dried lullaby seized with  
tangled pulse?  the fireplace's glow
breathes a halo around your baby hairs,
dances across your chest, & i imagine one day,
you will have wings to make peace with.

if only
the map to understanding someone were the faint veins
showing from underneath their skin
inside jokes would become popular products of wrist osmosis
     friendships quickly garnered in tracing intersecting veins
politicians would link arms
     learning how to be in quiet company
in good-bye embraces, people would bravely measure their smiles
     to know the depths of promises
a skinny wide-eyed boy from the Kalahari could touch
     a Minnesota man’s pulse to take in the white purity
     of snow, thinking it sacred for the way its brightness
     bore into his deepest savanna memory
the blind-deaf holds hands with a musician
     letting violin strings sing in his blood

secrets rush to the surface with every blush

my palm against yours, i’d see how rainy days
     truly make you feel
every time i’d kiss your cheek
     i’d sense the pockets of warmth you preserved
     from those who have left
one day, i can appropriately miss you
    by the wishes you make in passing
    the place from which words stumble under your pen
    how you decipher scents carried in the wind

as i scratch notes into the margins of
my essay drafts to remember my errors
i imagine my pen as a vein of memory
like the moment when the midday sky related
so strongly to a distant metaphor my eyes ached
& in my ears drummed a hymn
from a church’s womb
“i cannot bear you all the right answers”

once, a teacher taught me
the cosmic elements of physical affection
that each hand carries the dust of different stars
entwining fingers as lovers, we have melded together galaxies
a universe resonated within our wrists
i remember i loved you for your earthen hands
poised over piano keys as if to
give more oxygen to the music

nowadays your galaxy revolves
around another center of gravity
i still long to write us together
believing that in over-stimulating
kaleidoscope patterns
memories make more sense than feeling

must be the scent of rain on asphalt
or else she would not have considered
other vertebrae back-roads on which
to dispense her longings

ii.
you left on my bed
the shape of an arpeggio poised over piano keys
the shadow of a dream which engulfed you
as a storm-cloud’s lips curl over
mountain-range teeth

iii.
(i know the games silence plays on old souls.)

my mother’s friend named her parrot prettybird
& probably
thought herself quite clever for doing so

iv.
sunset leaves me in
disintegrated feeling
my skeleton is a tilted rainstick:
a rush through my pelvis
eases with faltering echoes

v.
conversation used to rebound
across champagne glass edges to the
stinging trajectory of your mouth
through the night
melodies would carve their course in drunken stagger
i watched your neck loosen over
your violincello stomach

(i once met three girls at a party & their
hair stood out to me the most.)

like every crisp leaf crushed under your sneaker
was a word & autumn the story,

you told me about the others- who you made
           sorry for transcribing the thunderstorm in your bones-
especially when you answered that although
thunder lingers after lightning, it is not its echoe.
i miss the buttery film of morning
on your eyelids (still fresh from moon’s caress)
how your smile navigates your face in uncertain angles
painfully bright like sunlight crackling along a pond’s surface
          (i familiarize myself with the view from colder depths)

then there was the pet canary you mourned
when it retreated from beating its delicate chest
against a matrice of wire. “cages are a part of life,”
           your mother had assured you.

& patterns essential as amended retrospection.
yet as i lay beside you, the sun suffocates colour.
memories blush twilight; fingers trace foreign runes
along your forearm. i will keep tying ribbons around
my fingers until i’m tangled into promises i’ve yet to keep.

           autumn was birdsong whistled into my sweater’s collar
bare tree branches conducted winter into its embrace.
i should have laughed harder when you looked my way.

you complain of me writing obtuse
like how i fail to distinguish the shadows
on your dainty lips from the ones which
danced to truth.
  i used to fit perfectly inside
your arms. but everything crystalline can still shatter-
a million frozen tear drops asphyxiated
in the sun’s glare, slowly dulled
by the dust of passing vehicles

i grasped for your hand, afraid the
moon’s gleaming scars reflected
your heartbreak. you breathed to
the same rhythm aging my sneakers.
   you know how better than i
the moon only borrows such beams
to maintain an excuse to keep hurting

i have never felt wholly captured
    instantaneously
by none other than her polaroid eyes
rather than permit language
            slipa wa   y
i clench my teeth until my words have shattered
marvel mutedly at how light could
    concentrate   on   one   spot
& feel the rising burn, a sunrise in my mouth
neither of us were awake, like spilled watercolor
                    (slowly expanding through the grains of paper)
             we remained unaware & uncaring of definitions to what we created

our unsaid words, straining though cumulative: we possessed
the touch of burnt moth wings
             the most delicate cinder

                  (perhaps someone can never fade
                   but half-fly half-toss themselves
                   into darkening horizons (never alive, impossibly free,
                   remedied only
                                                by dizzy carnation kiss))

meanwhile the earth shifts beneath each corner of our youth.
& sunset's sinking violet lips
 exhales velvet shadows-
                      lazily settling upon
       the silent smirks cracking the sidewalk

if only my mouth was
   prettier when open
   releasing the ugliest things
   yet bringing forth my vowels
   in blossom
i could cast my voice about
   the room as if it were
   a fistful of rose petals
   instead of letting it sink
   so broken-promise heavy
   the ‘don’t tell me what to
   dos’, the ‘i don’t need
yous’
   & such deceit would light
   upon your nose
despite their thorny
   origin, you would
   know i still
   only blush cotton-candy-dawn
   because of you

i dreamed of stars melting into hot white liquid, fragmented planet rings
crashing from the bowl of the universe into an unending dawn
woke to birds in gentle masquerading song
while my eyes still burned like dry kindle
            windows to my prematurely liberated soul that dangles
            as a wingless tragedy
incredulous a phenomenon as dreamers with
a learned penchant for gravity
in the borderline between awake & sleep stands an exhausted precipice, eroded
when simultaneously entrenched in desire
             blood colored with every shade of want
i lilt back & forth as if keeping time
to an internal pendulum: ‘less & less pain, less & less’
            delay my return to
lives spent governed by secrets of the past in which they formed their legitimacy
            a less glorious rebirth:
mist from my eyes adhere to particles of soil
after having threaded the darkest depths of my soul with silver linings
& found my skeleton drenched in gold
but such perfection only exists where there is no one to please
during long nights spent with unrequited love rebounding against the ceiling
& the blank consistency pacifies irises to smolder
‘i’m not supposed to be here anyways’, but your infatuation
for all things intangible above the ceiling
the reasons for why you ever wanted to make sense
continues to increase

in morning i detach myself from
the membranes of dreams

            the people i promised to love better
you have passed like glaciers of the ice age
the lethargic process leaving unaware

valleys in my sheets
instead of pinched wrinkles

sediment layers hopeless in translation
hence wordlessly knowledgeable
in the way your eyes plastered to mine
like wet leaves on pavement

            remind me of what makes me yours
the absence of you has not uncrossed the stars
desolate dawn-vestibules hurtling forward from nightmares
where infinite manifestations carve clashing patterns in the finite

am redundant on my toes, my
nerves & the spaces between

you are a medium for refraction
my soul bends in the dark

i used to watch the sky expand inside my peripherals
tell time by the dirt accumulating beneath my fingernails
nowadays my feet blister as i run
on blood pumped through an industrial vein
mixed signals overwhelm me; my senses, stretched
to cavernous proportions, absorb the dripping static
i cannot drink in the pulsating, liquid silence
without looking up to observe recesses of culture
dripping off someone else’s chin

refusing to participate in the debate
on who in this world is awake, i
rub my skin raw as a winter moon, feel a
a new kind of cold inscribe memories into my bones:
how words shaped themselves not from mist, but necessity
& when i pledged to never love like a jellyfish-
            without bones, pain as the outcome
            of every combination of embrace
so instead i wrap my skeletal fibers
around a wasteland’s cliffs

edges fragile as my eyelashes cradle
overly familiar ambitions,
dropped cadences of personal growth,
the burnt boundaries of the stratosphere

when he effects a first impression on her
            no more subtle than
            difficult ellipses preceding coherence
the sweetly unfurling spring                            (season of love!)
cares not how she holds his hand, but
for the winter that never seemed to melt
their joints are left in disjunction-
            cinderella fitting the glass
            slipper, too, had been told as a legend
after pulpy conversation, they would need
to guess what particles slip
            between t e e th
he would fear an interaction of failing organs
but his jaw remains incorrigible
others should tell him her value, reading
her face like a barcode, tearing apart
her smile inside their subterfuges
but those gossip-scientists, soul-window breakers
only find how definitions do not
automatically declare themselves
at the tails of phonemes, nouns, sentences
            they bend when caught in differentiated finites
            reflect the evolved cynicism refracting
                             downward from foreheads
i watch their frames
shudder
when we turn silent

it is common knowledge that day burns, night covers
at one point your absence will reveal
the obscure revolutions between:
i think i might reach self-actualization

my conscience has been murdered by apathy- a chalky outline drawn by regrets
now i await the verdict to weave itself through a telephone line
insomnia’s birds turn to constructing their cruel purple nests beneath my irises
new names like clothes lines, i leave emotional attachments out to dry

the content of reference books appears infinitely smaller
without someone breathing down my neck
            definitions, in a panic, pool inside my hands
skin: introducing us to a decision of whether or not we delve into feeling
love: encompassing all energy for desiring into one subject
            ‘you should know, i always did’: your way
            of expressing an inability to keep giving

everyone possesses their own illusion
of being okay
           (i only believe they never will be)

especially with
the way you stand on rolling ankles, our syncopated heartbeats
unfamiliar with unending marination
lost configuration as the result of opening my off-center mouth
my tapered tongue still grasps for what has disappeared

because bed-sheets
are not substantial material
for working out algebra

(i)
we spoke with gracious lips
laughter elemental of some otherworldly
dimension, perhaps sprung from
a green-skinned Kalahari
& i could spend hours watching
the black holes between us
gorge on time & space.

we drunk tears of disillusioned
idealists, wine laced with barbed wire
our words absorbed & abused one another:
wiping down our limp paper-mache eyes
wrists to harvest the red rubies
that leak from our cracking lips
brains like Charmin toilet paper:
   ‘use less, absorb more shit’

            but we will steal more from the upstairs bathroom
            then everything will be okay

(ii)
the world seemed to tire of spinning
& tremored instead, like my fingers-
restless to stitch landscapes from above
into geometric shapes
   ‘but that’s just me
   that’s just how
   i ruin things’

rooms
       we had never known
lie cement & gaping
       after the quake.
their shocked spines melted by the sun’s
cheery countenance,
it shines brighter in places
where we do not
belong: virgin groves, almost-heavens

(iii)
now the street is a hairline of rubble
fracturing the forehead of the city
ancient vocal cords make their final
gravely repercussion

   ‘i’ve been elevated to a new level
   of madness & meadows’
the farther i am from earth
the more i would rather
feel at home there
i await quiet revelations
possible turbulence
a red-faced pixie (-haired
flight attendant)
offering me orange juice

(i’ll say no, but she’ll
look at me like i need some.)

skin imbued with canary yellow wash
she blinks into porcelain oceans, glassy cosmic giants
the world is God rolling the cotton candy sky
around in his mouth as it melts into
evening aftertaste
pinkies swing into dream-tongues, etched
into a chin that lunges into adversity
                    - 'If I owned too many oversized rain-coats
                    people might think I'm in love.'
on this day she exposes dimpled sorrow &
knowledgeable step
                    ashen hair curls over period-stain prom dress
her mind wheels across poetic lines but
lacks the courage to create
                    - 'That is what makes me free.'
then punches her fists into the pockets
of her waterproof jacket crinkled
over a shapeless paunch
she reviews a central dogma for
walking through nameless forests
                    - 'You know they are that way
                    when humans haven't yet asked
                    if anyone heard the fallen tree.'
& while she drives conversation
into the wall, presses moons into her skin
of quickly fading luminescence
                    giving herself
                                        less room
                                        to care

thoughts perform themselves differently
in the classroom & in your bed
where repose ventures on a sanity’s-night-out
you reject prescriptions because
telling the truth never seemed like a healthy cause
neither was furnishing your subconscious
after all
   emptiness
                                        is
                     cleanliness
you were always too prudish to use prepositions
always lept sole-first into streets of shifting debris
& rather inconveniently discovered yourself
-washed up none too quietly
                                      by crinkling tin foil
it is my name that rests between the ridges of
the hardened lips of an oyster
  i still have reoccurring nightmares about
  my teeth’s alignment
time blooms in a garden of unforgiving
the choice to live     (here)
  is simply filigree, or kissing a face
  carved from extra bone & mirror skin
for all things minuscle: construct conspiracy theories
for all things grandiose: crawl towards
  the beginning of finite-
where the world continues to turn
watching it somewhat shatters you
but not really

Those are not spiders
   but your own puppet string fingers
   clawing cobwebs out of your hair
Outside on the stairwell, the footfalls of illusion echo
   like a melody welcomed over ghosts, whose
   outlines you estimate from the rasping calls
   of video tapes rewinding behind the walls
Your kelp eyes remain open for interpretation:
   an irrelevant constitution for daily work-wear
   the brave voices conversing about poison
            gently prod you about childhood deprivation
All of your confessions have been rearranged
   into questions by the same veiled voices who
   stitched wings onto your sins & set them free
The tedium of all this sanitation leaves you
   tracing letters with the frayed edges of souls
   you thought you had helped shape
But you are told in someone else’s fantasies:
   ‘i wish you were more of a square’
You apologize to the reoccurring strangers:
   ‘i was never any good at geometry’