What a challenge to discern
between different shades of love,
bundled vessels
beneath the surgeon’s gaze.

Am I enamored, or simply
safe within the confines
of your presence? Electricity —
or a grounded, warm affection?

Why must I cut us open so?
What about our coexistence
befits a keen dissection?
I cannot paint us faithfully

on canvas, gauze, or paper;
I remain chromatically confused.
I pray you do not take
uncertainty for misdirection —

I’ve naught but
colorful abstraction
with which to leave
our hearts perfused.

Goodwill ate all of yesterday
(**** my indecision.)

But I left with 3 dollars of fresh-spun grey
So
In a way
I’m winning.

It clings to me the way you did
But softer—immune to leaving

the contours of my waist
the curves of even breathing

Cotton oughtn’t
Outlive you but
It does—what can I say

Synthetic suits me
More than cruelty—
But not a day goes by

That I don’t bare my skin
(Breathe the fibers in)
Not so gently-used

And slip into the sweater
I wrought from spare change
Wishing it was you.

Don’t forget me:
I was terror,
but beauty, too.

Malevolence
It tastes so good
under false pretense

Bottle it up—paste it!
on Wall Street’s walls—watch
them all come racing
throwing Franklins just to fall

into a love that will erode them
in all its nitric opulence
What fools for malevolence
under false pretense.

We know, you and I (fix that tie)
that cruelty comes for free

I don’t buy abuse—
It pays for me.

Deposits soft-lipped guises
that always seem to last
I’m rich on lies—
I pound the glass.

Keep your change!
(My suit is screaming)
Lift your lids
Call our bluff
Drop not a cent
on malice decadent:

It will find you soon enough.

You are the definition
of a bad habit
But unlike biting my nails
Peeling the skin off my lips
or fidgeting until my joints crack
It takes much more
than 21 suns
21 moons
21 earth-breaking
Painstaking
Days
To get rid of you

Countdowns are two-dimensional
Don’t mean much
at all
to me

To see pixels in formation
Spelling out through transformation
the days and seconds till I
leave

It doesn’t hit
In the right way.

It doesn’t create the right pain—
Nothing beats when hunger pangs

Draw me to the pantry
Filing down the tins and cans
and my eyes land
on

the food that my mom bought for me
My favorites all stocked constantly
Knowing that I cannot possibly

Finish

A single jar of peanut butter
Let alone its twin

Before the numbers turn to hollow eyes
Before I close my door— say my goodbyes
A half-empty jar the only prize

To show that I have been.

I’ve a capacity for cruelty.
And I’ll be the first to say
I know
It’s wrong

To let the darkness in to play (in from the rain)
Without checking intentions
At the door.

I want

To hurt sometimes

To crush these friends of mine
Pressing efforts into dust so fine

That it’s not.

So wasteful to leave
Hard-earned apples in the sun

Just to prove
They’re yours to rot.

But I do.
I leave them blue.

And in those seconds while the wasps descend
I think I finally understand

You.

I’d like to think the forest and I
have something in common:
a quiet comfort to imagine
my veins as xylem and phloem,
vernal vasculature
full of sugar and elegance.

I’d like to be autotrophic,
in a way—a provider.
Sustainable, substantial, life-giving.
Imagine it: the world thrumming
about your roots, communication
with the soil, nitrogenous and softly damp.

I don’t know about you,
but I find peace
in my potential for symbiosis.
I can close my eyes around it
comfortably, breathing in the knowledge
that my exhales sustain trees.

I take pride

in understanding people who couldn't
Forgiving people I shouldn't
Loving people who wouldn't

As if I can see
Beyond what meets the eye

I'd prefer not to admit
it's simply judgement gone to die

There was a ****** at my childhood
playground today.

Don’t worry.
Just a small one.

Fitting on the tops
of the swing set bars

Feathers shedding
on me forgetting
to remember

the simplicity

of having no perspective
in a world of countless lenses—

It seems fitting,
that I’m peering through my glasses
as they crow: Death to the masses
On the pastel purple trusses

of a world I have to leave.

Like a flipped-over puzzle to me,
the edges of your heartflesh—
regal pieces
of stained glass and veneer.

Who are you, love of mine?
Not my love;
I was never under
such delusion.

I map our trajectory
with sorrowful hands,
the topography of unrequited devotion
an elegy in Braille.

All instruments fail to measure
the weight you carry
in my bones. You would sink me
in the Dead Sea.

And I would live it willingly—
a fate of saturation—
if it offered permanence,
a way to hold you

in my cells like water.
I’d surrender the need
for land and air if we
could inhabit the dawn of time.

I’d cast off all evolution—
eons of bells and whistles—
if it meant
that you could be mine.

I love you most when I am dreaming.
Rough edges fall away in fog
of the eyes that take their leave
from black reality
and revert to caverns gleaming

How it glances off your face—
that gem-light, stalagmites
catching light—Oh
how this is your favorite place

Where the purple plays
and fans across your nose,
cold colors bathed in warm disguise—
You are a masterpiece
to me
when I close my eyes.

But few souls can look without touching
Awe without taking
Love without breaking—

Mineral dust on the soles of my shoes
It requires care
to keep you
without making

The sheer walls tremble
The canaries die
Reflections waver in water streaming

I cannot reclaim you
from my dreams at night
for when I do



I wake up screaming.

I catch myself wondering
if all this quiet chaos
will resolve —
a black hole collapsing,
internal and unseen.

Or will the nebulae
of bursting into being
extend beyond the edges
of who I am and was?
Will they see me give up

on giving up?
I've been led to believe
that new beginnings like these
happen in an instant —
a distant flicker on cosmic rings.

But what if my future,
much like anything
worth seeing through,
devours an abundance
of time? What if

I must surrender
years of light and breath and
atoms to outrun
the galactic hunger
of my unrepenting mind?

I wonder: how much
of my soul — that red-hot,

throat-tearing,
incandescent soul —

shivers

on the brink
of extinction?

As time dilates and the tempo
of my little bird heart slows,

I recover pieces of self,
cast like felt petals on the way,

doubling back with a bug-catcher's
glass, counting the legs of my days

outgrown. I capture my child-like
wonder on a twig. I spy curiosity

on a leaf, speckled with holes
bored by time that rushes

like a stream with no regard
for the riverbed it erodes.

I step into myself like old clothes
and remember what it feels like

to be – existing for the sake
of existing. Where life is treasure

enough.

There’s something about
new-wave jazz,
all modern and electric,
that beckons armageddon—

a set of never-ending
Shepard tones, swelling
in sun-baked suburbia
like a body in the water:

light, rising, mercifully vague
as to the terrors
it may unleash tomorrow.

Love is in the details, the way
you ask me softly on that quiet,
charcoal couch if I need you

to press the web of flesh between
my finger and my thumb to ease
the pounding in my head:

Pressure for pressure.
It’s the way you say
I’ll be okay before I tell you

that I’m not. The way you know
I need to hear the things I don’t
believe. The way you see me

broken and beautiful —
a duality, not
a mutual exclusion. I don’t

know what to make
of us, but
it feels safe here. So I’ll stay

under nebulous terms,
until I burn your open heart.
I don't know why

I cannot hold affection
without tearing
my closest friends apart.

Your other self watches softly
from the far side of the room,
a decade and a half or so
between you. I line you up,
placing one over the other
like wax paper for tracing.

More lines this time around,
more furrowed concern
and a sternness
in the pursing of your lips—
flatlining, discerning. I wonder

what has darkened your eyes.
If not time, something quicker
and more violent. It hangs
in the drapes about your face,
upholstery of the self, rolled out.

Nothing wavers in your gaze,
no candles dancing. Only smoke
of a dream, thinning, deferred—
snuffed out.

You are pristine in my absence,
healing once the picking hour ends.
I stare through our distance—
the fun-house mirror
that has morphed us into friends
who love,
but not in that way
anymore.

Who hug,
but never linger
long enough
to toy with hair and affections.
Who have committed to separate
directions in the sea—
we drift comfortably
and wave from splitting barges.

We bloom best
when left
to our own little acres,
and that
is what's hardest.

I kicked the past in the chest
when it dared to run by
Breaking and bruising—to remember
him using
old brass keys from the cabinet
to wind

me up and then
Leave.

I cursed his sterile heart
Inked out his jagged eyes
****** him
to Hell
To claw at walls of the well
he made me fill alone—

Raven boys
They crow
but never cry.

But in I draw my limbs now
as I watch you
Blue heron on the surface
of the sun

(where the sky meets lake)
Turn to burning dark—awake
I eclipse you
to see by moonlight
what I’ve done.

I hear hints of constellations
vying for a place
But the starlight dies—close
those supernova eyes—you
***** them out
press the pillow to your face.

He never cried.
I wept in my own
twisting orbit—never touching
Gravity kept me nonetheless

Now I watch you
wipe your eyes
Too scared to think about goodbyes
(I hold you)
Part of me dies
in your duress.

This is what it’s like to love me.
To love you
There’s fear of change—of loss

But I’ve got you.
I’m not leaving.
Stargaze together—
A glimmered evening

This
is what it’s like
to be us.

I know I cannot have you
(even though I did).

I know that seasons change
and people die.

I know that we spend much of our lives
fighting against such things.

I know that certainty is taxing
when it does not favor you.

I know that knowing becomes a sacrifice
when the truth is out for blood.

It takes time to know these things.
It takes many walks through tall grass
brimming with burred burdens.

Thick skin—
I've been told that I need it. Otherwise,
I'll be painfully privy to the stings of a reality
that remains inconvenient.

Otherwise, I will look at you
(or rather, the image of you)
and feel pain. Otherwise,
I will feel that tug on my lungs—

the collapse of the hope I built so carefully
on the foundations of so carelessly
loving you
back when time and space allowed.

Back when it was easy.
Back when I could have you—
back when I did.

Sustaining such carelessness only ushers in
wicked knells of realization—the weight
of infatuation in wait, stretched thin by miles
untraveled and unseen.

Circumstance becomes unsightly—obscene
when what I know escapes its chains.

So, I refrain from the tightening tether,
skin tanned, but far from leather—
I attempt to clear the ledger and forget my winnings.

I drown all that we took in my misgivings,
now that we're living
where prices rise and bills come due.

I say I know I cannot have you
because it haunts me that I do.

We are all a little something
human—fragile packets
of bravado and bone, dread
to be alone
but destined for it.

We all deplore it, this existence,
in metered amounts—
twelve teaspoons of having
no thing figured out
for every drop of felicity.

Yet we go persistently
into tomorrow, thrusting away
today's wet weight
with jazz-age paddles
unfit for the cause.

What else do we have,
but to be
without pause
until our fatal
interruption?

To be caught up in
falling down?
Until we're ashes—winding round,
and round,

and round...