i’ve lied
all this time,
waiting for your voice to call
“can you hear me?
are you okay?
talk to me.”

but can you feel the fury for me?
the smallest trickles of sweat—
golden on my face
—will love you in the shade.

can you mean it when you tell me
you want to stay silent?
or my feet will feel weak
and my legs will crumble
and i will find myself straying away to the road.

i need anyone,
but i want you.
i want to be held halfway between heartbeats.
i want an answer, delivered in the quiet midnight blue.

but maybe i won’t hear you,
and the world will stay just as cruel to the both of us.

but even then,
free me from my stasis.
even so, hold my hand with fervor.
this may be all it looks like,
but whatever grows beyond here,
carries more than just the unknown.

your lens
tuning itself to me
bathed in viscous red

it thickens;

a smile of pure outrage
pins to my cheeks with such force

you don’t know
how many times i’ve prayed for this:

a menagerie of bottles
splayed out on the table
like drunken bodies

smoke streams from your lips
across a green fall of light,

these days will become nothing
but sections of a film
suspended between hands.

i cannot find within myself
any semblance of aliveness
if not under your embracing glow

i can only pray with ire
to the wisps of the night
you will never find out
how long i’ve waited.

happy we are—
my father in the driver’s seat, sleepy pupils set on a starry screen
—palms bloodied with sweat.

“turn right in fifty meters”
otherwordly whistles fall past my origami eyes,
while silver bullets carve a gentle varnish
on their cold, black portrait.

i search for you
inside a brazen, leather-skinned bull;
across a glossy loaf,
i see, scattered and dimpled, your elegantly ruined face,
and can’t help but notice that tinge glazed upon like dressing,
from between my eyes, along the outline of your ear.

and as droplets of canary englazen my entire being
and as i, myself, am prepared,
unified,
and divided again—

and as if you, yourself, were waiting for me
at the end of the elephant’s tail—

i’ll await unchained hands
whose nails will scratch at this unleavened flesh—
or at least, i may hope
—for what am i if not the object of another faraway song?

blessed and cursed
with distance and desire,
which god will tell me
that our fingers may meet?

across her golden, gabled field
i saw you--
my beloved, detested, metallic colossus
--once starry-eyed, once honey-skinned,
we bathed in that shrill of your voice,
how endlessly shimmering
it was.

as if to suggest disturbance to the sky,
your darkened eyes pierce upwards
they pierce the sky
and pierce the clouds
and pierce my own.
they are your sabers--i realize
all too late
--forgive me, my beloved, detested, grotesque,
your screams were strung on telephone poles
while your blood irrigated these wheatfields,
and we relished in that ignore and in that bliss
and in that love.

so, my beloved, detested, unholy
swing the iris's hilt--
how i beg of you
--and tear down the rain.

men loaded with guns
guns loaded with bullets
bullets scorned out
like merciless sentences

berated by the harsh blue and red
--and white again--
before it all spills onto the ground
murky and grotesque and divine
into the dusty cracks
they'll feel his breath subside.

your name to me
is like a hive of bees
alive and unapologetic
inside of my throat

i itch to shout to you
to sing to you
to flee into you
it is my faith that tells me
i’ll stand in silence in your arms in your eyes

so every gently fallen night
i pledge to you my every breath
and to you every hitch of my breath
and to you every shaky riposte to my breath

darling, my darling
may i be so bold
as to call you my darling?

will you wait for me
and will you stay for me
and will you shout to me
it is my faith that tells me
i’ll find patient grounds
by your side.

i dance, i dance
to my starry-eyed love song.
i dance, i dance
even in ash, we’ll sing along.

eyes and ears like cinder bricks,
their faces have known no hue.
and pretty, pure, wretched white flowers
vied for sun from the cracks in their skin.

“take root, child,” they whispered a lullaby
veiled in milky, murky convictions,
it’s a dead language the flowers sing,
their soles will batter all the ends of the earth.

undeserved, unfair, unending is their floral dance,
dust clung—desperate—to a serrated stem:
every swipe of the tender, silken dress
is a strike to their shaded, cavern cheeks.

we’ll dance, we’ll dance
to our teary-eyed love song.
we’ll dance, we’ll dance
to the song strung centuries long.