I can feel the blush creeping up,
betrayal invading from my cheeks to my ears - so much for playing it cool
Am I the only only?

i think my heart lives in the gap
between her two front teeth

a firefly nestled in sheets
of dark and less than two years
in this world of ours
and she already gleams

the lamp
was a little bird
in my room

a brother’s last night on the other
a cup and a half of sugar

tea
and a few
light days

Something to begin
finely gritty on the teeth
looking closely to imagine eons of life
now crumbled into near-dust
shells and skeleton and fossil
bones of the earth, too
to put it tritely, a positive graveyard
littering and lingering
and softening seashores
lone insignificance & collective immensity
humble beginnings and humble endings
so long spent on the face of the earth
and now being shoveled,
handful by handful,
into my mouth

whenever we get our own
hands will shake
untethered and all the way
friction for me and my god
hoping for more than that

Breaking and aching from far too much friction,
I'm stricken with toenails too long for these shoes

That absurd thrum,
The rhythm of all things
                (beneath all life)
an ancient yearning bubbling up
              (as could-be memory)

If I could scratch the same thing twice
Write a single good sentence
I would

I'll grate my tongue into a million squidgy bits in a bid to shove these words back into my mouth / language and I, we suffer a fickle friendship / I'm clumsy I'm clingy and I can't keep my hands still / scaring everyone and everything off

My teeth haven't fallen out
But thats just a present truth

I'm finding it harder and harder to make my mind flutter like it used to from just the thought of our bodies being confronted with one another

might try to think fingers away,
a bird in the bath of my eternity

A sustained note:
those breathy songs
quiet love in that bedroom,
painted red then green then red again
that night like every other

the taste of sleeping pill ringing clear and bitter at the transition between mouth and throat
so different from the taste of sleep

is it a matter of principle, then?
pottery shards stamped into oblivion
cave paintings scraped, unpainted
unraveling pieces of the past til they never were

that which exists without my knowledge
that's what will get me in the end

passing an island
on the highway
echoes
other structures
passed on other roads

Once upon an-archy,
I felt the tension deep
in the tendons of my arms

Felt a jag, a jolt
of something yet to come
(something So long past)

two red lights almost shimmering in their distance - a product of heat?
or is it space?
maybe time?
i couldn't say.

This is the castle in the sky, the other side of the hill
This is barred windows and a barbed-wire fence that dwarfs even the sun
This is the ill-fated watchtower: a mystery until it wasn’t

I never wanted to know the smell of bone so intimately
(any chance we’d ever had was poisoned from the start)
Anger, anger, anger - it coats these walls like pitch
(it should’ve worked, I swear it should’ve worked)
Goose-flesh tears so easily but it scars into stone (it melts even easier, but then turns to lava)

I never would’ve believed that God himself lived in cobwebbed corners (wasted my whole life praying to the patron saint of carrying on)
I never would’ve believed that I could physically hunger for light
(we slept in tents and built the walls that would hold us captive)

I should be mourning the days I meandered away