tell me about all the time you spent rearranging the furniture afraid of the silence being more comfortable than your duvet

We dug up the soil today
Thousands of insects rushed out
Centipedes, beetles, spiders
A crumpled grub writhed in the sun
Too weak to do much else
I’ve always hated agriculture
Fingers tearing plant roots
Sap soaking flesh
A neighbour walked past and said ‘looking good’
And it was the saddest thing I’ve heard all year

This is the church of the crooked and fractured teeth
These are the hours slowed by lack of sleep
There is nothing underneath this breath
There is nothing but the body you left lying cold on the concrete
Isn't leaving sweet?
And I'm pouring out at 12am all the words I never said
Painting bottled affection to fog up your head
Hours without sleep lying in your bed
I loved this even then
Into the lazy hours
The nights when you picked flowers growing out from in between my ribs
Little light we sit and swig as I wash your feet
Intoxicated by the pleasant relief of you letting me down
I escape the room without sound only to write of nothing but you for weeks on end
And these nothings float up into the rafters and I wonder what comes after this absence of you
What I wouldn't do to tear back into you
Into the gaps of your teeth
I don't get the release anymore
I watch the moon move along my floor
As I Invision all the knots in my spine you whispered into
The black and the blue and the bruised
I'm not broken just used
But I still dream of you and how I would have abused the touch of your hands
I never belonged to another man but you
What's a girl to ******* do
But pour it back out again
And maybe you will
Maybe you will too
Maybe you will stay this time in my skin
Wonder what we might have been
If you would only descend again
The wanting never ends
And I am bruised cold over you
And for the way that we moved
And I can't hold up for much longer
The waves come back only stronger
And maybe for a little while
I'd let you come back around
And we'd tangle again a union of unholy sound
For this is the church of the crooked and fractured teeth
These are the hours slowed by lack of sleep
I don't get no release without my tongue in your cheek
I dunno it's just been one of those weeks
Just one of those weeks.

You are an attic that my thoughts are still lost in.
Your mind is cluttered with ideas, kindness, secrets and confessions,
all covered under thick dusty blankets of bland conversations.
Every time the sun hit a part of your mind,
you revealed a memory and I like a child
oohed and ahhed at this over told story.

Despite the floorboards creaking “baby you don’t mean a thing” and dust lingering with the goodbye that will never be said,
it was my favorite place.

I would try bringing up my own newspaper clippings and photo albums but there never was enough room in this attic I suppose.

I remember one night I spotted poetry painted on the wall
hidden behind a pile of blankets and your record player voice cracked with the words ‘you're beautiful’ and ‘you're perfect’.
But maybe the words were already painted for somebody else
and You’re voice caught on the vinyl of the moment.

Darling they told me that a family from Utah is
moving in next week,
I hope they treat you well.

Darling the door has been locked and boarded without a warning

DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO MEET YOUR GAZE WHEN IT MAKES ME SO VULNERABLE? DO YOU KNOW HOW INTIMATE YOUR EYES FEEL EVEN FROM ACROSS THE ROOM? DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I'VE AVOIDED YOUR GLANCE IN FEAR OF THEIR INTRUSIVE WALTZ IN MY THOUGHTS? DO YOU KNOW HOW DIFFICULT IT IS WITHOUT TRULY KNOWING THEM?
DO YOU KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
you must know
you must know the ache in my skin that your stare leaves
you must know

Of course you'd start to come back when you're about to truly leave.

How do I tell you*
I love the way three dollar wine tastes,
a cheap buzz lighting up my veins,
merlot dripping tears on the floor
I sought for comfort last night.

How do I tell you
That silver is the sweetest color,
singing songs into flesh as I drag her
through scar ridden skin,
opening rivers and avenues
I could be an architect with the way I construct,
drawing with permanent marker on
scribbled, blood stained satin

How do I tell you
I break off pieces of myself,
store them in my broken heart bank,
savor memories for later, when ripped
liquid velvet
doesn't leak onto my fresh floor
anymore

How do I tell you
I curse your nightly name,
thick tongue tasting the
stale sangria of your lips

How do I tell you
How do I tell you
*How do I tell you

A festering toad, happening upon his friend the owl, began upon an uttering. A sort of delirious asking. "Why are people so afraid of death?" With this owl content and basking in the moonlight, they did speak upon the truth of the matter;

"Because when you're dead you're dead see?," the owl remarked so haphazardly.

"But what point is there in that statement," the frog stuttered in with a knowing kind of sinful grin;
"After death, could we not begin to fly with the stars, or at least just pretend that we are orbiting Mars?"

The owl simply replied, "Remember toad, while it is I who pierces the veil, it is you who must lead the spirit parade through it’s transformation."

The toad croaked a sigh at the owl, blinking its ever seeing eyes at his brother-in-arms in feigning return,remarking that “these must truly be times of madness for a mad toad to lead the way….

A shriek! "THEY ARE THOUGH, the rest of the animals forget, basic reality is made up of nothingness, so cheer up, we are all basically nothing, but agile enough to get by don’t cha know!," the owl looks to the moon in its sort of quick jerking way as if seeing some truth inked in it’s light.

"Agile?" the toad cups the question with his consciousness…."Agile enough to derive strength from above and to cater to love through the rough when we tumble hard and it feels so tough... But you know owl, there's life and blood to this stuff so we best start emitting light through  agape sans the gruff.

The toad started repeating a mantra towards the Crystalline reflective lake due south, the direction of healing, transformation, and death:

"the essence of your mind is intrinsically pure, the pure doesn’t mean a non-***** story...pure means clear….void. No eyes, no ears, no mouth, no heart, no I, no problem."

The owl began to speak a slow sort of lullaby in response to the mantra; “Luckily consciousness is like a mirror that needs to constantly be polished.”

The reflective lake of all things replied: “But in truth, there is no mirror. Thus, if you are living in nothingness and if there is no mirror, how can you be contaminated?

This is the most incredible nothing life has been privy to experience, for this nothingness is like the nothingness of space….which contains the whole universe, and out of this void comes everything and you are it. The fear of nothingness….IT plagues those we know, because it has been ignored .

“NOTHINGNESS,” they say, “HEAVEN PRESERVE US OF THAT!“

At the appointed time Agnosia and with the approval of the moonlights shine, the foggy cloud of unknowing descended upon the lake, the toad, and the owl, who all began to speak to chorus in such sweet unison:

“That which is the knower or the known cannot be an object of its own knowledge, Fire does not burn itself. If you put something there on the divine platform, you stop short of knowing and you stop short of glowing.  Following the flowing senses of truth;  Don't stop until you can rejoice in the I that isn’t.”

Everything went quiet in the forest and on the lake, as the obtuse fog displaced itself. The forgetting had become complete.

I think we buried him here.
No, no. Don’t dig him up.
Sometimes when it rains the earth opens up and blood pours out.
It’s like flesh, you know?
It’s getting harder to breathe so the pores have to open wider every fall
and more and more blood rises.
The other day the electricity in the city died.
No, not just the lines.
It was like a pulse.
Every electronic device failed
and suddenly we all saw ourselves reflected in our screens;
cellphones, televisions, laptops.
Everyone was so scared.
I remember a child gripping his knees.
Mum, mum, he repeated, but she didn’t reply.
I listened for a minute
and did nothing.
Hey, cheer up.
Some say at the end of every year, all the dead skin we’d shed to that point forms back into itself.
Living, breathing beings indistinguishable from their hosts.
No one knows if they remember their pasts,
if they are born as blank slates or prefigured individuals
destined to repeat the same mistakes,
over, and over, and over.
One day they’ll take over the city and we’ll be out of jobs.
They’ll forget everything we spoke of today and drill deep into the earth.
The flesh will split so cruelly it won’t ever knit back together again,
and blackened blood will carry skyscrapers into the earth.
Don’t be sad. It’s inevitable.
Think of it as returning to the womb.
A pure
unending
nothing.