and the marijuana tasted like the church on stuffy Sundays, mourners locked inside, striking confessions from their ******* with mighty tongues.
a choir, a choir,
a million decaying angels
sing thee to thy rest.
it’s all nonsense words, this fiddle-faddle
when i just want to tell you what i mean but i can’t wrap my teeth around the right words to explain how eloquently exquisite you are, you are
like a diamond, you are, you are.
i’m bleeding words, baby,
sittin’ here, just for you.
how can i tell you the butterflies you give me turn me into a stone each time i look into your eyes and yours meet mine and those snaky tendrils reach down and grab in your skin in all the places i yearn to kiss?
there’s a wall, a force, like the one they pray to, pagan god of love, strike me in the heart with thine arrow, free me of the frozen fear stone grip i so often find myself trapped in.
let the smoke mix with the alcohol and let the tobacco numb my tongue so i may reach the smallest hand through the cracks to brush your arm,
once.
(all i dare.)

maybe he could taste the desperation on my tongue,
the cool way it oozed off like the way the lace slipped off my shoulder.
i believed then i could swallow him whole,
make him a home in my heart.
but he had other plans.
while we noiselessly rocked together in the dark
i was dreaming of blue skies and bluer oceans with no bounds;
and he was counting down the hours till we’d part.
i need you like smoke hits my lungs:
heavy at first,
dripping.
then fully embracing,
enveloping.
then so fleetly flying,
disappearing.
how i hate to watch you both fade naked into the wind.

I see you in my dreams:
a whisper in shadow,
disguised as someone else.
when will the boys come dry without being drenched in your name?
there’s so many
experiences I’ve been living
alone, and I didn’t
think I needed any else,
but now I think,
I was just walking along-side your ghost,
trying to tell myself it was alright.

oh, marionette man,
there’s a hand in your spine, purring in your ear
directions and visions
- love, life, and loss -
loosely slipped from
your lips like a fear.
pulling off of your fingertips,
squeezing your throat to juice out those words on my plate.

oh, marionette man
there isn’t a home for you here.
matchsticks and driftwood,
thin strings and yarn for a heart.
you’ve been flinging your love into space.

later, farmed fetuses spoke worthy of creation,
bucket list spiders,
they cluttered an inky page.
thunder it rolled down the mountainous cliffs
and it struck and it stroked you,
all in your lotus leaf.
storm clouds reached fingers over the ***** field,
seeping in holes bored deep in your cedar legs,
yawning and mewing and shouting and firing:
we now know where love lies alone.

oh, marionette man,
if earthen materials constructed your insides,
then what am i?
stretched over a surface,
veins pumping this burden,
a hollow space in your chest,
i feel it too my dearest.
aching of rivers and
******* in forests,
the movements are a ballet
but we haven’t an audience.
splinters cut deeply,
they stick in my flesh
but i’ll take them, i’ll take them,
for your empty heart space.

we don’t know who we are.
we don’t know what madness is.

but we breathe in the air,
let it soak into lungs,
and then won’t it please drown us:

Whole and then Undone.