I have you head in my head
spilling out like coffee light
one morning when we were in a cafe
after court
a green day
time was sewn up like like a rip in reverse

I felt myself tip toward you like
the western hemisphere toward the sun in summer
drawn in
you were the moon
I was the shore

your skin was warm
the river pulled at us
you were so warm
you held me up

one night you smiled at me that way
and turned around again and I kept watching you
the chilly night air and streams of smoke made it obvious
that they belonged to us

I felt a good thing then
when I was there with you

my faces are the
about faces, my little breaths
are little deaths
I am like your cry at night

my time of day is seconds before dark
when suicide is a life-long contemplation;
a standard deviation from the sidewalk,
and the sunset is a reason

my day is the day when
suddenly,
your addiction makes you sad instead of happy
so why don't you stop

my breaks are all the breaks and
window sill stair fire escapes
used for smoking under-age
I've got it figured out early

my ocean beats against the rock of ages
I'll raise my fist and ***** on my own defiance.
I'm aching over my forgiveness, begging,
is Jesus still in pain?

well

The recognition was incomprehensible and I thought of my face in the mirror
the look and the sight of the white line cigarette pinched narrow and thoughtfully between his very first finger and his thumb. It was the pose of vocabulary. An expression of the understanding of words and the pauses that build them. A sigh for the sighs that frame them. He was an only. You don't look and forget.

I lean over throw my shoulders right in front of you towards the far corner of the room. A deep breath and my skin fills my dress. This is the physical of release, and the fabric falls. You fall into the light laid out on the floor your face follows up to me while it turns into a question. Adhere to vertices and hide the lift of your lash.

You want to know which way I'm going you mean by that which line of verse enunciates me next. I understand but you don't. In tiny things we find enough to let go. To demolish wholes, flood systems, blink. In tiny things we are commanded to go on. You’d known, but I - I had not yet walked home of solitude since we had spoken to each other without interrupting with another.

Open your Bible to show the empty room static that with more knowledge comes more sorrow you are very sad. You’re on the cross of tired and hungry because man does not live on bread alone and can we ever be sure of what God meant by that - especially when he conceived of distance. When you read the red letters give your eyes to the sky and keep a hand on either side of my face.

Deep underneath my eyes I think of you (I think you see me thinking you) and see you trying to write into crossing paths with poetry itself, specifically, the ****** embodiment when your words expand beyond yourself and with a turn envelop to evoke another. I open my mouth slightly, shut it and lift a hand to you to say: it walks in with it's own grace, beyond force. wait, love Everything, you try to create into it is only taking - only sit and wait. Until you stop taking, nothing. but you had known, the wait, I had not yet not known

the pause was helpless but the silence was becoming. There was no choice, we kept going

We lay, you on your right side and I
on my stomach

  you can   hear  waves   crash
(steel girders twisting under stress)
An ocean of mercury, sloshing lightly- less than silently.
Ripples radiating as waves collide and
a drop is flung free,
into the perfect moment of    separation.
As the bauble is balanced,
I float momentarily flawless- circular with surface tension;
my wagging tongue wrenched free and swallowed whole
in the moment while I wait
for your answer.
I asked
are you in love with me.

I was right outside
when she pulled the trigger

and I remember

crashing sound, in my head
my knees, my shoulder blades. A turbulent din
heart beating like a cave collapsing
air desperate to escape from my lungs

and silence.

Light falling away,
slowly like snowflakes
with the weight of dusk
and me standing
staring at the holes that were in everything.

Suddenly, everything was a mountain.

and I remember                        it

---------------------------------------------------------------­

I sit here and watch as if I couldn’t reach out and touch it
Can I?
The decay is not in your heart or your mind, it is in your soul.
Its coming out on your face. Gray stains forming around your eyes.
How do you get rid of that?
Your playful (terrified, i’m so scared, i’m scared) voice.

In 3am empty
sitting on the floor by the window gasping for air.
How can I reach out and touch that?
I watch the nights wash you pale with insomnia.
Strings of black hair. White face. Cold morning light.
How can I reach out and touch that?

I sit here across from you at the table, watching your eyes look through me.
Words are coming out of you that I don’t understand.
Words that don’t fall on deaf ears
but on deaf hands
making me suffer like I was paralyzed.
Your lips barely move as you speak.

There’s a sharp edge to this
its cutting the line between consciousness and sleep
you’re saying
The days have been good to me
you’re saying
I am just going to get older.

I can feel it in me
death is in me,
and I cannot
get it out

For a moment it is quiet. You sit there, like something meant to be on its own \
and I sit here, like an empty chair.
How could I reach out and touch that?
My mouth opens
Be okay.
I’m saying

Please be okay.

--------------------------------------------------------­-------------

its gradual            ,           the darkness is invading me
filling the back of my eyes
the depths of  my ears
the pores of my skin
until I die.

I take another dragging breath.
feel my bones bend the wrong way
too far

These days feel so old
this sky is so heavy
this wet air tastes so much how it did
last winter sinks in.

and I remember                   it       so well    .

---------------------------------------

today, a new offense
I could not believe it
the sun pulled itself up out of the ground
without you

january sun
light without bright
day without warmth,
burning as dull as a nightmare remembered
following a shallow line that is far from equinoctial

time passes like strangers faces on the street

already,      fall falling falling
a falling scattered hush
night, again

my little heavenward glow
my redeemer with bony knees
you were never alarmed when i'd go
or when the summer burned my feet
you sent me a million notes
gauging new york and it's many beams
and you came home to gloat
with black licorice and beating wings
oh! everyone swayed you, Bonnie
with Teflon coated strings
and everyone had you, Bonnie
the sniping smoke was my reprieve
when my ma asks of you, Bonnie
I see our tails lashing against the gleam
of this filthy ******* town.

i.


dear poetry, we met when i was four,
you were count lestat, and it was love
at first sight. you were made of bone
and bane, and razors, i was a mosochist

and you were a black widow, i would
know, i was there, trying to pry
open all of your eight legs, looking
for the amrita.


ii.


dear poetry, if i were to answer all
of the thirteen questions you have ever
asked me, the answers would be,
no, no, yes, march the thirty second,
"how frail a human heart must be -",
diacetylmorphine without the butterfly,
mother, yes, barely, jolene, you don't
love me, contractility, and no.


iii.


dear poetry, you have pretty legs.


iv.


dear poetry, i am an ugly archetype of denuded
adolescence and i think you smell
like teenagers and a leather hacked smothered
in *** and black labels and ck perfume,
and a pound of god.


v.


dear poetry, if sleep is the brother to death,
where does my mother lie,
before ribbons of aubade
seek the flower in the sky?


vi.


dear poetry, today i don't think i love you anymore.


vii.


dear poetry, if you were humanised,
you would be ugly. you would be defleshed,
you would be ugly. you would be marked constantly by
ugly people and you would bleed ugly people.


viii.


dear poetry, today i might ******* my muses,
i might make them wear fishnet leggings,
with ****-me heels, i might give them *****
to suit others that **** them better than i do, and
it is all your fault.


ix.


dear poetry, i promise myself i would not speak
to you anymore, at least not in words, but
we both know poets are nothing but
liars, don't we?


x.


dear poetry, i am not a poet, all the poets are dead.

they died for you.


xi.


dear poetry, i am writting you thirteen letters
a year, they are ugly, like i am, they spell
an ugly word you would never speak of. you
will be anatomised, i will stuff you with
consangunuty, i will re-invent you.


xii.


dear poetry, you are older than me,
i am twenty, but you are only ten,
i am ripe, bruised, plucked from purple lips,
nothing is ageless.


xiii.*


dear poetry*, i am going to break you,
grind you in a mortar, roll you up,
into a blunt, and i am going to smoke
you along with the angels.

We are
up late in the static dark, and we are
together
laying in your bed perfectly still,
our limbs filled with movement
Pressed down onto the floor with the weight of imperfections in the air.
Hands and face
filled with blue blood
a silent grin.

can’t sleep

So
we go
our laughter stumbles out into the dark
pulls us out, as we follow currents of sound.
The wail of atmospheric jet planes, lonely crickets,
the boom of empty 3am freeways
a chorus of ***** angels
brings us to stillness.

Laying in the dirt
stars arch overhead from the bottom of my chin to the back of my neck
emptiness like falling
and if you close one eye

you whisper
against
my skin

you can reach out and touch them
so I try it
it feels like nothing

And with a glance,
time shifts
the earth tilts
your silent face,
open to mine.

At corner of midnight
I'm an ache in your bones
stepping out to say good morning
to morning,
there's dark streaks on the street
(what is it?)
flashing into my face like
the blood pouring from your shoulders and your elbows
and it's real
(stab my ribs stab my skin I wince at the sight and these things I can’t get away from my head falling to the ground in the street, to my knees on the streaks in the street
close my eyes)
I can't say morning now that it is night
these are things I cannot allow to leave me
because they’re (somebody has to remember, someone, no    )
twisting my veins into dying matches
(a, its killing me, though it is)
making me remember
And I remember the urgent black hushes and
trees
drawn towards heaven like the hands of martyrs
in a word november         air of desperation
black lines
flashing across me cold like
the ashes that
ate you up but couldn't steal
your face from me
I wish they could
as there's bits of glass on the kitchen floor
I can't move them with my head
or my heart
A glittering array of threats to scream into my ears
(smashed lines o my hands my face my ears o what have I done o the blood
on me is yours the blood pouring from my
hands I am a murderer)
this glass gives flashes of light they reflect your silent moments
bitter and tearstained tumbling knuckles
(these walls won't be pierced)
, you're whispering and I choose not to hear your voice
I choose through fear and that moment alone
is enough to die
but there is this too,

You were someone who breathed
and looked into mirrors
(they shatter now to meet me)
A little boy who sat outside and watched the traffic
outside of that house in the city he misses the one with the garden his mother tended
(she's gone and left him now she's gone and killed
died)
A boy without a coat in the snow saying to us that his hands are blue
but he has no need
A man who woke up and had to shave
to be presentable to himself
who stood by a church yard waiting for the bus
imagining a muddy new grave in a life passed
(one with my name on it. how
long? how beautifully short
no matter how beautifully short)
in a church yard by a spot where the bus stops
A boy drinking wine
drunk to shame the halls of mind of diligence of strain
***** on the carpet
You were a man smiling walking between the river and the
lawns which you are not ever to walk upon
smiling at a scrap of paper clutched strangled by broken knuckles
dreaming of Russia
A man who would leave and not say goodbye
no not goodbye no
N    o            good
night.

One purple flower blooming for every day someone should have said
I love you                                   /iloveyou
for every time I smiled while you cried
every time I smile now
For every night that passed by
the sad man
who fell asleep wrapped in imaginary arms around
a still cold body (to dreams that sicken waking hours)
for (every night I can remember./o the things I should have said, I the murderer) his nights that went un illuminated by one phrase, two words to a soul,
(an open sky
to the earth and
the length of time                                /two last words spoken noiseless to bleeding ears laid against the floor
to the distance between this heartbeat and your next,
to your last)
two words reached into (stretched strain to broken light)    
infinity

goodnight, starlight