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.

darling,
stroke me in this instance
strike me in my temple,
there is patience here;
the ground on which we stand
for now,
knows no fury
the sky is washed with lemonade
and you can see, on the outskirts
a dark, foaming omen.
but never mind him.
we are in an aperture,
angel sweat cascades
like sparks off an anvil
stain the soul with an evergreen petrichor.
we are human. and we are not.

lemonade, aperture, petrichor—
the sky will enrich my hand
with yours.

windows rattled
on edge,
huddling against our cinder blanket,
it was on the frame that we etched out,
prematurely, our obituaries
tilting in a tempest;
the world shattered away
with some painter going off to mourn
his shards
slicing the cliff of your cheek,
weathering,
eroding,
dripping like the earth’s wine

the ocean fell in sheets of cold,
unrelenting ice
like a blanket with holes snipped up
in an indigo night,
like a robin maniacally flapping,
flying too far from home.

beside him
i stood amongst the dragon’s onslaught
amidst his water, ice, hail
in unending, windy ballad

and he screamed
deathly, beastly wailing
against the thunderclap, stabbing
into the gust
with a conviction veiled behind rainy eyes.

papa always forbade
any drops of gold which escaped my skin
and yet, here i am, un-alone and undone,
in between your neon eyes
and a black ocean, spilling out from your skull,

you intertwine your skin with mine,
as the paint-splatter words around us
trap themselves in my periphery,

forgive me, papa
throw caution to the wind,
and chase her down to your cliffside cottage,

you, prowling lion,
auburn and amber mixing
together in the painter’s jar,
refuse to heel before the hunter,

intercede on my behalf, o Beloved
pray that the image is forever scalded onto my skin,
that of the halo hung abode your heel
without end, singing into my fickle ears.

sirens wail a razor tune
like the metal wind
scraping the side of my ear
i pull my jaw agape
in a lake of starry glass
we run our fingers
through a godly, wispy beard

I’m living in one half of a waltz;
battered soles wipe the dusty wood;
a floor on which our two flowers once lingered
on which grainy moments remain scattered
between the cracks you left behind.

My hide is ruffled,
as it once was, by your candlelight claws
and my frosty gaze melts
just at the thought of your searing skin
falling onto mine.

A man who takes pride in his modesty
took whiskey with his coffee.

To my dearest sir;

Your beaten, dry hands are no silky cloak
and yet they clung to my quivering shoulders,
bruised and breaking bones;

A silver, rusted ring,
which smelled of bygone perfumes,
hung onto your callous finger
and cleaved my spine to shards.

Your words painted with gold,
stung like lead to my skin,
and by the end of it, it was I who sang to you
a grateful lullaby.

He waltzed with me
across a dusty circle of earth,
stumbling, falling—
into yellow eyes;
Manes interlocking
like threads on a tapestry.

He loved me under lantern-light,
held me in the spotlight,
his whip becomes my holy necklace,
his snarl became a glassy smile—
Oh, how wonderful it was
to’ve been tamed by a beast.