Yes, I know I am a flower and
you are a vine and according to
horny poets throughout history
 
I am also a harbor's worth of nouns
representing objects that are
delicate, concave, and receiving and
you are a boat full of words
synonymous with being sturdy and outward.
 
But I want this
slippery we to be
what no metaphor can release
like how body parts and whole souls
colliding in hip swiveling rhythms
transcend these reductive translations
just like
 
the gusts of wind from my lungs and the moon's seductions
can't describe the way they are the spawn of
the faraway sea tumbled and weeded
out onto your landlocked prairie shoulder,
 
too removed from the rest of the world's
relative theories to be compared to
anything but ourselves:
blossoming, organic, botanical.

All you need is
heat
and
time.
All you need is
fire to rise from
hands and tongues
and
the knowledge of all
the burnt toast of history
if you want to do more than survive.

At a kitchen table upon which I wrote
the ingredient list of my inside
placed between two curtainless nostrils
breathing the smell of trash and
the sound of ambivalence outside
I learned that

if things fail,
just add some more salt to preserve the memory of sweetness,
enough to be reminded that this world should be taken
with an entire shaker of it and not just a grain.

Between alphabetized spice racks and
forkfuls of fearless nights
I saw my recipe book ripening into
something others can consume, instructing:

stay close to your vine
and your grazing pasture,
support the suns, memories,
stoves, and stopwatches around you,
and consume nothing
without really tasting it.

Her laughter splatters
in black and white and sometimes purple-speckled amoebas
onto consciousness and cluttered tables
at my pronunciation of the word birdpoop.

Burdpeup.

She asks me to say it again
and I do,
trying to infuse it with every
squashed bug crunch,
jumprope sneaker-to-pavement thud,
and denial of seriousness that I,
and I know she, too,
has ever heard.

Burdpeup.

I say it again and again
like a series of dropped missiles
detonating peacefully onto
windshields and patio furniture
as we're looking down on this landscape
searching for more people in midnight kitchens like this one
who still appreciate the
misplaced deposit
of the feeling of childhood.

O cotton-stuffed womb,
O hedonistic cloud
anchored to this Earth by
lighters lost from horizontal pockets
and better selves found in vertical thoughts,
O shared throne of shared pleasure,

I’m not even grossed out by all of the
fluids, foods, molds, boogers, butts,
ash, animals, insects, and secrets
on, inside, and around you because

we’re all friends here

and I’m sure that if my toes ever dipped beneath
the flesh of your cushions
the things that have come to life down there
would tickle them because this

is a place of worship. Let us join in a prayer
of inebriation to the God of Tonight,
the God of Life is Good,
let us praise everything artificial and cancerous,
let us praise the absence of God
because that guy just wants to ruin our fun
I’m not taking orders from him
he, like,
wasn’t even invited to the party

but you,
O rolling hill of eternal youth
in this kingdom of stagnancy are at our mercy.
Not created in but coincedentally resembling our image,
you look like the paper I will write the history
of my growing up on,
you look like the syllables of modern prophets,
you look like peace for a while
at least I’m less fucked up
or at least until
the smoking time between my fingers extinguishes itself

but until then I will rest my body upon your body.
I’m sure that if you had hair it would grow long
from consuming the health in this morning’s lessons
born from last night’s regrets
and if you could laugh
I imagine it would sound like foolish wisdom
or maybe like love that has been reincarnated
in the form of a big stinky couch.

i want my braces
to get stuck to your braces
when we kiss

my train tracks on your train tracks
our compartments colliding between cavities

the survivors from your wreckage
have set up camp next to my molars
and have made a shelter out of
the things i want to tell you
that they found in the back of a freight car

my conductor is shining a lantern
through tunnels piercing the mountains
of stories you haven't told me yet
and walking to the next station

tell me everything
through split track lips