I listen to couples make
comfortable word-work
with slurs slurred and
gawking at glazed windows
filled with the feeling of
forever empty—forever
falling into the pit of
“perhaps this can be real
enough” for me and my
lover and this child and
for that great long while,
left looming under dusted
streetlights. If only for a
short long while, can it really
truly be, just you and me.

There are broken things
               I can never fix—
                         even though
                                I’m older—
      no matter
           how much I know,
my hands are still wounded green
                      with Spring’s earth—

from even before I knew
          the pain of destruction—or
the chaos of a single lie
             (before I knew it was a lie)

when I was crawling on sunset
                  in the tall grass
                       of our backyard,
          silently following
                       my brothers
                           (newly jaded)
                 as they joked in spite
       about our mother’s volatile shouts
from our sky blue house
            of loose and spurring rage.

The winter catacombs had
long since seeped into the skin,
so that my eyes were scarred open
to ransack the surroundings. The faded
room’s flicker of white noise wrangled
itself inside, while droning tones
tucked away each staggered sigh.

Perhaps it’s farce to believe
that feelings can be trapped in
the wavering spaces where we
can never return. Maybe in all
the languid memories that sit
cross-legged on the edge of well
practiced absolution can never
truly be touched: like gripping
yellow, or blinking chromatics.

Despite this, found mangled against
the gate of my ear, is an urgency that
is engulfing. Concave to the outskirts
of breathing, I am told that all one wants,
is for the age of their quiet, non-being,
when the silver knife arrives to cut
silently upon an existence already grown
too thin. Years swell, but each passing
era exiles what it means to be—because
we can only depend on the reality of flesh
and the chance illusions of refracted light,
but never the notion of something more,
so, the dying, jaundice question lingers—
who will wipe this blood off us?

The days stretched out to several inches thick:
such wakefulness lives beyond the orange glow.

With each guillotine-morning
came a syncopated lullaby
that danced with delusion and
mirrored the nothing sky.

That evening, I saw the waltz
of human tragedy performed
by all the wailing trees.

Walking down Waugoo Street, wading
through the water: fists folded in silk-lined
pockets, in awe of the misting droplets
that silently encompassed me.

Yellow gloss across the walls—the
mirror mocked from down the hall
and taken to the shrieking room, with
orange-stutter seeping fast into
my crying on the kitchen floor: realizing
there might be nothing more, than the
emptying of existence—framed in the
decaying swings of a metronome, and
loss left lingering on the phone. Of

feelings surely found by faded tongues, and
the blood that pools to the bottom of my
lungs.

Her life was smoke—suffocating any air
that fought to hold certain sight as readily
as eyes starve for immobilizing sequence.

In her frequency, she could eclipse the whole
of your sun and your moon and soon enough
there could be nothing.

Nothing except the hollow hours cast
in disintegrating lilacs, that scorched
simple skin across each tired ending.

Her life was smoke—but at times
there hummed from her, amidst the rolling haze,
slipping chords, not yet callused.

In her spreading, the occupancy of her transparency
dissipated: and behind her eyes, was the quiver
of her flame's decay.

Decay was a ritual she consumed willfully. Even as
her wick sought its end, she would still wander
into the kitchen, seeking empty kisses of *****.

Her life was smoke—spent hovering above heads
that had suffused themselves in gasoline, wondering
which decade it was, she had left them.

We cast our shouts into the streets
and found ourselves spilling glances
to the ground, where the run-down
women sleep (drifting nearer to their
bloated end). We balance up along,
humming dead-beat tunes gone
wrong, under street lamps wrought
with webs and dust, but this will
never be enough so—

We cast our shouts into the streets
and peruse the moods of faces gray.
There must be freedom for the working
slave! Just strangle the veins that collapsed
and stayed! because the room for talk
holds no vacancy, and the artifacts of
thought now sell as novelties, but you
don't seem to notice so—

We cast our shouts into the streets
and mix (transfixed upon the air) our
laughter crossed with ashen wear: ignoring
all the city-cell-blocks found blinking
in dry sinking volts. Don’t let the sky
drop its weight on you! Watch out for all
the grabbing gutters near—no one can know
when hooks begin—but we won’t
remember then.

In the innocence
of sweet incense,
we spoke by silence.

With our window open
to October, it inhaled
the neon evening.

Folded together like
hands cradling water—
sipping in the metallic
hymn, howling out from
passing trains, or even
the droning wind’s breath,
adorned with the cadence
of now.

Lingering in the ellipsis
of your unyielding eyes,
I find myself swallowed
by the vines of blue-green—
found strung-up with their
golden roots jetting out
of such deep stillness.