I'm collecting each passing moment
with a pinch of salt and sugar
sprinkled in my memory

One, two, three shakers full.

but the sands of time keep slipping
through my mortal fingers

I keep an empty jar on the top shelf.

and everything else is a blinding mishmash
of my mind in the morning light.*

Please don't look under the bed, it's embarrassing
what I forget to think about.

Is that still you?
I remember days of not breathing
at the thought of your last breath,
of loose words
and using them to carefully twist
a heartstring hammock.

I can't see past the red in your eyes now,
the spots on your face like footprints, track marks,
soft and tired,
hard like needles.
They stripe your skin as if for an ancient battle,
for a war that soaks your empty spaces in kerosene
and scrapes the match off your wrist.

So while these butterflies pull my stomach
out my mouth, to the floor,
and your feet shuffle from the bombs erupting
down to your toes...
I can't bear the thought of a cloudless conscious,
of reality too close to the glass.
The thought that I can't save you from this,
because all I want
is to burn down with you.

Distances waiting,
breaking mystique in free fall,
shook pills from the clouds.

I dug your path before you woke,
tumbling with dust off your spine,
and you rose blank from the underground,
forgetting with the sun
reasons for burying in the first place,
the existential burning
which reasons awake.

I held you up before the storm
and there your lesson went unlearned,
shaking with hailstones and bitter words...
what didn't **** you,
provided by remains,
would be not basis for any gain.

I lit your torch before you fell,
hands cupped against the rain,
but you didn't go like burning books...
more so the man who tripped with stones
and licked with flames
his ignorance away.