You decide if time goes forward or backward,
whether the earth begins here or ends, say, right over there.
You name things into Reality.
Bones, flesh, skin.
These are concepts, works of fictions we tell ourselves in order to feel real, or whole, or assembled.
But we are bags of blood.
Our only reality, our only truth, is feeling.
And feeling too much.
Like how the whites of my eyes are permanently reddened by an invisible fire’s breath:
the glow of your face.

Every morning plays over like a silent black-and-white film.
I am nowhere: I belong to the realms of the in-between.
I am the glint of light in a thread, the starlight, the particles, the grainy matter sliding between your fingernails.
I run through beams of light on buzzing highways, I am in the walls.
Now I am far away and you cannot see me.
It’s physics.
It’s ******* physics!
I can see it all before me: the infinite equation.
I am free. I can do anything.
I can become the light and the voices and the bells and the twinkle in a pigeon’s eye.
By the time you read this,
I am gone.

Every morning plays over like a silent black-and-white film.
You wake up and somehow you’ve forgotten how to speak.
Your throat feels raw and congested from the disuse of night.
The sunlight strikes your eyelids,
affecting an obliterating blindness,
forcing them apart,
drawing you from the velvety embrace of a dream.

Your feet sink into dirt-smudged sneakers;
they drag across tiles and floors and grains of cement,
across blackened splotches of gum tacked to the streets,
pressing them ever deeper into earth,
into tar.

A young woman in a fitted red pea coat stands near you,
leaning against the steel column by the edge of the tracks.
She is tiny,
her olive skin stretches tight across her bulging cheekbones,
her eyes are pools of grey,
her shoulder-length hair is the color of molasses.

It happens slowly:
the woman in the red pea coat leans further over the ledge,
tilting her head to the side,
searching for life in the roaring darkness.

It happens briefly:
a low rumble beneath your feet,
a glint of light,
a yellow-white rectangle splays across the tracks.
It widens and expands,
oppressing you,
swallowing the woman in the red pea coat,
as she looks up and stares back at the brightness.

The train does not strike her –
it consumes her,
it ***** her up like a vacuum through its sharp metal teeth,
and she vanishes,
or she becomes a refractory beam of light,
or she explodes.

A screech hovers above the crowd,
shrill, high and clear – the rawness of terror.

You cannot help it – you peer into the gap
between the platform and the subway,
absorbing the darkness.

You wonder what moment, precisely,
her life left her body,
or her flailing limbs surrendered to their inevitable consumption.

The paper bag she had been carrying survives,
strayed on the platform,
an afterthought.

At the peak
It felt like diving into nowhere
Endpoints nonexistent
All I saw was her, then celestial white

And in the hazy aftermath
This flurry of creation
This jagged promise of newness
Everything real coughed up in our numb faces

But it doesn't snow in Texas

the body shook uncontrollably,
the road dropped out from underneath us,
streaming cracks of frightened light,
steel grey sky, the high-line
illuminated by a faint breath of heat
the dark shame had me full in its fist,
dead light simmering now on a fallen rock
lift the lifeless face.

the planet waited but no one rang,
the heart stopped curtly,
stuck in the pain,
I waited for no one, so no one came

Sea drop sea shell eyes
I reckon she's for the taking
Sells her body while it's
Broken open

The words taste funny in my mouth
like tin
School. Escuela.
The place we go
to rip our self-identities to shreds
and force big thoughts out
through holes too small
with languid, careless tongues

"You're ambitious,"
he says with disdain,
spittle collecting
in a corner of the unfed
mouth

and he falls,
drumming his fingers on
her bare knees
like pick axes
tick tock down
the body goes
falling fast
like a drainage system
***** life from organisms
clotting in the sink

"We cry too,"
she says loudly,
but no one seems to hear her
except for a sorrowful
trombone whining
noisy and rambunctious like
the wind and *** and
pain only really matters
if you're there
to witness it

It seems strange...
The voices of the TV on-set screen switch to channel nine STOP play it back again
far
it goes