someday i hope i can find a blank concrete wall on the side of an abandoned strip
  of road like yellow hyphenated tape
                      perforated straight down the middle: you, me, a picnic basket in our cherry red convertible with
    a can of graffiti staining the tips of my fingers black,
                 brazen instrument of destruction   spraying across the
obscenely grandiose texts that paint the insides of our minds, excerpts from howl, anything from tartt, lyrical, aesthetic, so above our heads like the smoke on your lips oh
                    the road trip is the one line track to solve all our miseries;
somewhere we can just stretch our arms out to touch the wind, in and over and all the way through,     somewhere we can  stretch our heads back to feel the sun drip down,  basking,      soaking, heating  and enveloping          glorious warmth,
          linearity mocking abstraction, with all the semicolons misplaced, all the words inverted, all the secrets unkept and blurted beneath the rustle of tall southern grasses and the smell of burning wood and light sage and the dark loveless sky, cold and everywhere
  but we will save up swaths of the unloving night, tuck them in the folds of your flannel and the creases of your skin
       all the while listening to something sad like matt healy on the turntable
   tinny and distorted running out of our car speakers, scrambling for purchase on the cheap leather seats up and over and through

someday i want to keep a bag full of midnight dances and music          
                    softly escaping on the sorrows in our hearts and the little whims we pray so much on
     with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, watching as the glassy light falls, a flag on the ground, a foot pressed into it, digging past our lives, digging into the new america, paradise for pageant runners and paisley princes
         in the garden, and i have not found so
              in paradise we are found, and here we stand, two broken things next to each other. horror story twins, you the white, i the dark, running the whole house down. we leave with abandon. we live with abandon. whole, and then suddenly, inextricably, returned.

she was obsessed with this idea of rebirth because she messed up too many times; she believed everyone deserved a Rennaisance, and it was her vision of the circle yeats drew,

and it was for dreamers who squatted in gutters along alleyways hoping to find a muse fallen and buried in the filth;

and it was for realists who really had fallen and buried themselves in filth because their homes were lower than that;

and it was for addicts, who believed they had really been to the moon and conspired against naysayers;

and it was for conspiracists who knew all along the moon simply didn't exist because they had it manufactured in their kitchen;

and it was for sleeping girls with trembling hands who sought out this kitchen in the night whilst everyone merrily slept;

and it was for the sleeping boy who really wasn't asleep but lying naked under sheets and limbs;

and it was for the tangled limbs that still quivered next to him from a dissolved ecstasy, boyish and sad and hungry;

and it was for that hidden starving hunger that still plagued the neighborhood's homes and lingered on doorsteps, begging;

and it was for begging peals of laughter that his mother sent up from the rooftop when the sky went dark and only her kin across town, reeling, beastly, gorgeous, could ever reply;

and it was for unsent replies, for conscripted soldiers, for wars fought by better men and surveyed by lesser;

and it was for less-than-scrupulous masters who hid under their solemn cathedral art that spoke higher than god himself;

and it was for god who left the world to fend under his illusory cloak of stars, so dim it only mocked his fiery wrath beneath;

and it was for that fiery wrath, the kind that incited and ravaged and devastated, merciless with abandon for all of mankind's own misgivings;

and it was those misgivings that had started her renaissance, her quest for glory cores and sovereign minds, for signs and streets and women and colors and light and the end of all suffering;

it was for restart (like a death, but shorter), somewhere between termination and a genesis in vitro (the liminal space found within and without); for her alone, solitary line cleaving the shadowy folds of time, defiant, windswept, miraculous, insignificant glitch through the eternal night; for her, until she commanded time to stop; for her, hungry; for her, powerful; for her, terrified; for her for her and only ever her: the regifted universe.

shifty birds, why do you sway so?
on the wind, in the surface of the lake,
            you are a disordered heart
   and yet, you hold?
flightless vessels, what bore you here, so many lives away from home?
if only it were so easy.
you say you will leave like that, leave by the sound of the water.
to the other side of lakes mirrored and glassy eyes showing even less.

leave by the sound of the water.
a charmed life, indeed.

/There is no fellow in the firmament.
              but only fire can cast down raging blood,
running through the city, flagrant
         smoke on a collonade of scepters, raised
— line by line: note the conspirator in the masses
                 Doth not Brutus brotherless kneel?/
traitorous hands, leaking red
                 /Speak hands, for me!
— from a dagger plunged deep through the heart of eruption it
                                          spills chaotical, arterial, sinful
                                      down and down ribbons of life
        crown in rotation: halted
on tumbling tyrrant, passes guiltless largesse from hand sought to
hands yet seeking, searching
[whisperings]
         "but on what grounds is usurpation justified?"/
         "what cavity yet persists in the dawn of these reds rising?"
kneeling king, sodden with loss
          bend for me —
                       Et tu, Bruté?/
screamitbloodymurdersingitholydivination
                      ­                 Then fall, Caesar.

like those moments in harmony
when i say "you drive" and
        you say "i drive"
and the universe
                 concurs that the
                              one of us
will tip our head back and
     the other one
of us will clench the wheel--
wherein both parties reap the
                    spoils of our little zero-sum game
because i get to leave the ground
                                 "don't stop"
kicking up gravel with the heels of the rubber and
you get to feel the earth
                                  "let me go"
leaving acrid smoke and burning metal
   and then, there, that somewhere in the middle i win and you win and the windows close us back up against the cold whiplash
             of sand and air
   and the sums cancel out like they
                                       always, always have.