I destroy my imperfections with methodical, practiced precision.
In the mirror.
Face to face with the witching hour.
I swallow them whole like oysters in the moonlight,
ripe and swollen.

I strike when I am the least opaque.
Which is, of course, when no one else is looking.
My belly swells to fullness with my mollusk sorrows
and all the ways I hide them.
I admire its roundness, and caress its crescent shape.

I am alone on this plane, with my hands,
Where every night I digest and birth myself
in endless cycle.
Until morning.
Daily, I reteach myself my own history in pictures
And try to remember how to love.

The shockwave hits your throat
so fierce, it forces your own voice
from your own body.
The momentum it contains, unconstrained
by your silent spectre
rushes forward like thunder
into the levee of your knees, and strikes
the way lightning fells trees.
You're nothing but lymphnodes, flood
and weight, now.
The rest, like last night's dream
washing away the moment before you remember.
The aftershocks ripple like echoes,
capsaicin in the nerves
of all your timber limbs
dismantled and thrown to the horizon.
You hover above
what it felt like
to exist.
It rests on the tip of your tongue, a moment.
Nobody really knows the difference between
a moment and eternity.
Below the folds of water, sweat and skin
the ground is offering whispers
bubbling soggy underfoot.
They might be yours.
They say it comes from the ground up
Channels reaching channels to connect
in a flash
a crack
again
to body
even
if only
a moment.

So tired, ******* exhausted
of tired promises, promises
You'll never keep,
You know that You won't
(So why do You make them?)

Not sure, I don't think
the cave under the falls
is worth the battering
But you tell me you Miss Me
Miss Me
So I keep spending,
Wanting the search

YOU, DEMOLISHER.
I, BRICK ABANDONED.
I am made of the substance
You were built to ruin.
You, Spender of Time,
I, Timeless Monolith.

Take Me, Take Me,
Take me down -
Brick by brick You undo
(with tiny meaningless hopeful phrases)
Bat your eyelashes while you pocket my pieces
So You can keep telling Yourself
You're tender.

A furious 'thud-thud, thud-thud' hammers my bones
as I whip shirt sleeves and scarves across my room
and into the small latch-lock box.
The one with the brown leather handle that smells
like things-so-old-they've-turned-to-air.
Long ago I lost the key but the shape of its missingness
is the most familiar thing left in this place.
Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life.



My footsteps ricochet off the walls to the toc-toc of the witching hour.
I hail a cab and lament the bouncy back seat and pop tunes of the humming driver,
pay with an app so I don’t have to say goodbye.
Not to cab, not to town, not to room.
The high-pitched wails of the most popular human carting system
grates my melancholy between the tracks.
Claustrophobic, crammed into more boxes
I.
Hate!
Boxes.

I…
Can’t remember how I got here from there.
I sit at the airport waiting for a canceled seat so I can get the next flight to:

Anywhere, Extra Cheap.
I look at a clock and I shouldn’t have.

Footsteps haunting, tracks grating, bumping, wailing, mouth humming slow to a blur.
The family next to me carefully removing themselves from the smell of my suitcase.

“Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life,” I tell them.

Black-penned words scratched in long, pressured strokes,
Page after page I soaked with this boon
Filling spaces in haste to match pace 

With the steady leaking of my wounds
Seeking inky cure to stem the flow
Oh, I’ve been told to dose with X’s and O’s,
but the X’s jagged edges poke right through, 

and the wholesome O’s are full of holes too.

In the dusty fields
at the foot
of The Grand Tetons,
A small colt wanders
in the vast grey-green lather
of sage brush.
Blotted brown patches
across its belly
like
black mold on the ceiling
Of my memories.
One can never be sure where
the clouds end
and the mountains begin.
Those looming chalky blues,
Not unlike the sea.
It is only a matter of time
before the colt finds
what it is he was looking for.
It is only a matter of time
before blue meets blue meets
green
meets sea
meets sky.
One day these mountains will
No longer remember my name.

I pressed my hands into the small of her back, and
Sank
Up to my elbows, in the thick and sorrowful
Tension
She wound so tightly around her waist.

She said our bodies hold our trauma so maybe, sometimes,
Mind
Can know mourning.