the sky is wet like a mouth
the light extremely fragile
bellow people keep fighting, dancing, dying
a soothing sustance, this perfume fills my nails unassuming
the real & the imaginary fuse & diffuse each other

imagination keeps you real
by chance tears feed the earth
we need the continuity of gestures
the prelude of silence foretells the foxtrot of words
a dream clarifies the windows, solidifies the doors
like a tide of awe against the void

In your wake,
In your silence,
a subtle soundtrack
swarms my head.

The melody of beeping monitors,
The rhythm of knuckles on bed rails,
And the verses, pitched in pain.

They only grow louder, still.

But, grabbing at the void
for any last sound of you,
I hear the wind rushing by
as the world just keeps turning,
I hear the cackling of atoms
that never stopped their motion,
I hear the grass strands
rudely displacing your plot’s dirt,
And reality itself popping
as it rips apart at the seams.

Truth is, I thought I’d feel silent without you,
But it’s grown louder, still.

he lives in an oblong trailer
at a trailer park.

every night he'd make a pitcher of margaritas.
salt around the rim of the glass.
crushed ice to the top of the glass.
the glass cold to his hand.

he turns the t.v. on
and the lamp on the night stand off
and sits in the easy chair
in the darkened room.

he'd drinks the margaritas
and watches t.v. until the station
goes off the air

and then watches the random dot pixels
and listens to the static coming
out of the t.v. speaker.

the flashes of light flickering.
and the blue light settles on his face.
eyes open, staring.

the darkness reached for him
and in the ghostly flickering,
he let it.

Punished by the sun
in a desert of our love.

Slipshod the sailing stones,
how dispassion speckles the playa floor,
salt pans dissolve motivating force.

I'm a man returning to his ground.
You're a woman seeking refuge
in the cracked crevices of my rib cage.

So far below sea level,
where does love go from here to survive?

Perhaps, Chloride City
and the grave of a James McKay?

Maybe at Bottle House in Rhyolite,
the "Queen City"?

Either way, this sensation has become an unsacred mirage:

the watering hole, a leadfield,
with which we can only look back from.

Praying the sulfur in the sky
passes on from this place,

before we turn into something sodium, something akin to
Lot's careless wife.

loving you
turned me into a poet
both the artist and the muse
all at once
knowing i'd sing for you
just as quickly as i'd bleed
to make your world
more beautiful

even now
i'd describe the sea
a thousand ways
just to capture
your shade of blue.