I saw your face for the first time in a long time, and it was no longer mine.
And the pain was gray and pink, and soft, like gum, like gums
No longer able to bite
The smile I’d snuffed with confusion
Seen with the eyes you no longer flooded
I cannot say what it was
But it had fur and it breathed deeply
And I loved and bled for it
Now you are yourself again
The paint, before it dried
Before we ever touched it

I saw your name on a furniture store sign,
Bright across the highway
Among all the fluorescence and so peaceful
As if I could say hello to the graveyard with love,
As if the Best Buy and supermarket were also debts we had squared
Together

Would it be too much to take a sip from your stars,
Uncover the man left staring blank into the crowded yard
And your apology was quick and nimble
I had planned to meet you there
In the sand

Say it louder
I’m listening

There are many things to be said,
A tiny bird in a square patch of light
You locked the door but forgot to close it
So it flutters at every banging crash in the frame
Wind will be a guest always, coming in to the city
We have historically excused ourselves and shouted, projecting, over it’s head during dinner

Maybe one day you will hold me close in bed, in the after-dark,
Whispering, and my laugh fogs up your chest

We listen while it rummages for a snack in the drawer

I watched you eat chocolate for breakfast in your work pants
Your tired pink turning everything that was green into blue
You will discover infinite things before I do and so I get to live one and a half days extra on top of each one given to me
I feel like an eternal castle bell
I must be so because you explain me like a ringing in your skull and just as liquid gold
So liquid that sometimes our disagreeing sunsets are worth hearing your voice for so long
You describe plastering a wall
I hear that there has been discovered a new section of Earth

We are most alive when we cannot see clearly and the next step could **** us
But to get home we have one less than two options
Again and again
You’re the heavy rain and the thick, ****** wine
And I’m driving and I need glasses badly

Please spare me the boulder- push
I am strong but I’m not strong enough
Please give me a piano-key life
All our darks are above us
All our futures pale white
I imagine you forgive yourself and see my insides
How you were no match for a trick of the light
That I didn’t know ******* when you died
And sometimes you have to bleed
For worthy days
Peaceful nights

It is scrawny and starving
Kicking at its gate, gnashing it’s jaws at my hands and throat
Bleeding through the chains and hay
Collapsing only to wail through the roof and into the sky

I sit at the barn door and sob

But I love you,
So I don’t feed it and I watch it die.

Like your jaw knows anger,
Your feet know wet socks and creaking boards
Like hands know a hot kettle,
Kissed and pulled away to burn pink a while longer
Like an unshaven hunter, resentful of the forest but feeling home nowhere else,
You know my rivers and roses

How would your hair feel in my fingers
In a new world?
Or your stomach against my back,
In the twilight
Before any decisions can be made
In the lavender hours when we are vulnerable and un-expecting
Still mine, still yours,
Until we again become ourselves
Though feeling our own pulse
Through the other’s hand

There’s a world at the end of the earth for us
And I go there with you, even without you
Even when it’s beyond touch and sound
Too far beyond hope, begging, tender new start
I find it in the darkest part of the night
In our songs
In the sky above the bridge
In the city we’d never revisit
With anyone

I know what I did, I know what I did, IknowwhatIdid,
But you haven’t done enough to make me concede again and you never really have
So maybe I’ll beg
You know the more I try to love it,
The sicker it gets
Take my mouth away from me,
I don’t know how to use it
At least for how it’s intended
When I use it to scrape your soul from its shell like a cold-water clam
I’m the captain

Hands swift, taught, carving.
Aurora borealis on my open back
Thought we might name our girl the same
Crashing into the world with your eyes
Flashing green
Loud, humanly
Through our chests and the sky

All of the rivers that led us here
Began clear
We knew our way like our tongues know our teeth
Like losing a soul tears the muscle
Before it leaves

Those lips are a moral dilemma
And agony is so close to a full-body finish


I think I’ll stay deaf and blind a while longer,
Let the city burn

The house is locked and doused,
Give me one more breath to light it
Then you can take me in a grey-blue storm
I’ve been ready to go

I couldn’t save the lawn or tiles
Rotting loudly
Cracking like fingers in a fight
I think if I had just one night
I’d give it to you quickly

Gray can only hide so long in the black
When I wake too early I can see your eyes in the dark blue
Sometimes you burn so much trail, you can’t find your way back
I hope I lose all the details when I think about you
If there’s a color between deep orange and light red
I’ve felt it each time I try to sleep
If there’s something sweeter than eternal rest
You’ve felt it every time you’ve laid your skin on me

Brooklyn has given me
Many redeeming qualities
Or memories,
To tie to the headboard and fight over nightly
I’ll try anything twice
So long as the truth is a stop on the way to playing nice
And theres a long time
Between her red hair
And green eyes
That you could use to figure out the right
Things to say to me
So we both can finally get some sleep

I am so disoriented and malnourished from you torturing me in this cell
I almost thought I’d see you behind my locked front door,
Sitting and waiting for me on the couch
When you don’t have a key and nobody’s been home all day

Four tears like chandeliers
Dripping diamonds and light
The freckles bounce in between and laugh
You’re too pretty for eyesight and yet not loud enough
And I know it’s hard to be strong,
It’s a million miles until the next drop off,
Crack enough skulls and you’ll find a brain in one
Wring out enough bodies
You’ll get a scream from some

If we met today
You’d find all innocence or none
Nobody could begin to fill your space
Except a thousand men at once
You’d cut my leather if I wore it,
And stretch out the lace in strands of pearl
I knew well the skin I’ve fought in,
Until I wore it in your world

I think you were a dream
Real as anything, but I can’t have it again
You thought your eyes were like the December Pacific Ocean,
Gray
All I saw was green and deep water

You never deserved this palpitating heart that keeps me up in the darkest dark, the brand new you I created was so much better, so much better that you hated him and hated me for creating him and forcing you to see you could choose greatness, and the things for which greatness is made, and the incredible orange happiness of mornings waking up with a yawn into my neck and hair. You hate him because he is the you that you chose against again and again and it is him who sleeps with me at night.

I regret you fully and to the very soul

I returned home at 4 o clock
The latest time I’ve ever known
Through your voice I found my echo
Through your voice I found my home

And in the pitch black, hopeless moments
There’s one place I always go
Your fragile pulse pressed flush against me
Your soul making me it’s own

Cicadas are eating my roses again
I wonder how I ever caught and killed any,
Much less a hoard of seemingly hundreds of thousands
Buzzing, electrocuting my insides, there is so much coal in my stomach now
Face too wet to start a fire
Or do anything possibly useful

Still, these bugs punch holes in my flowers
They have blonde hair
And blue eyes

It’s strange to taste a slap in the face
Feel it through my waist like a slow dance
I wonder if you plant those flowers at every house on the street

I couldn’t explain the way I wanted you

Go ahead and let the bottom take you,
These pieces are better split apart
If there’s anything left that could be called ivory and innocent,
You’ve found it preserved, wrapped up on a shelf in the dark

Then, there are the million shades of green I’ve tasted
Sour, bright, unstable, often man-made
Take me far into something natural
Let me know when you get there safe

I’d be myself
And ask if you want to go with me
You’d say no
I’d rather the cold
To fall asleep in the backseat
Completely lose my time and place
On the drive home

Through wet hands and a wet shirt I weeped that I needed you now,
Even though this heart and chest you’ve battered like a barn dog
And in choosing yourself, again,
My deep trust snapped like a boot through a locked door
Splintered, final and bringing something immediately after
But morbidly musical, individual too
Like breaking a handful of dry pasta in half
Ignorant, but making no difference in the end

Silver metal hummingbird  
Clack, clack, clacks against glass
While the car jostles and I **** myself over needing you
Sometimes the ring is a hum when you are there to sing the harmony,
At other times it is a shotgun blast in an abandoned war tunnel
I am most eloquent and hollow when it’s your nails at my throat
Though I can’t speak,
I sing

And I am number fifty
The drive home cracks at the seams,
Though there are many skylights on the horizon to eat
And I fool myself
I plant, water and let myself down
I memorize this address
Like a back-alley mistress
Or a difference
To how I usually sell
I’ll see you in hell six months from now
In the pillows
Breathless and full of doubt
Like a real dream
Or a kids room full of tokens to keep
Absolutely obscene
How you split through and blood-let me
I’m a master,
And much faster than anything you challenge
Blood-bonded and free

To drink you like a garden martini
Full of crushed blackberries
I’d **** the seeds through my teeth and let it burn
Painter,
Please strip and re-color my tongue

Head in your hands,
I say “you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
“Do you speak to anyone else like that?”
Since we’ve been here together,
The world has been uninhabited

I heard church bells the day you died
I recognized them as being for a celebration,
Or a holy day
But how little I knew then
There were no angels or God that morning
I saw you again and the trees in your eyes were already stripped
Gray bark, and you could snap off any twisted, shedding branch
Beat someone to death with it

I don’t remember how I got from Southgate station to this corner market,
I was with you, smelling the leather of your coat
And scratching the tickle in the root of my scalp from where your chin sat
I reached my hand past the stubble and into the curls
The whole way home
I choose something sweet, cold
The refrigeration might bring me forward,
Instead my hand is now slipping in condensation,
I get into the car
Wet body and warm tongue,
Shaking and needing for food, forgetting what my own voice ever really sounded like
Just how you left me and how you will always find me again

Everything you are has become gelatinous,
Soluble in water
A spinal chord and neurons
Without a blood pump
Or an inner voice to tell you where to put it
Somewhere between a sea being,
And spit on a window
One is beautiful,
The other is human
You belong to much less

You are not you, you are not trees, you are not mine, you are not a leaf in the wind or a sunbeam through the curtains  
I do not trust this new model
You are dangerous, dangerous. Not like a rich and ***** night,
Like rats crammed in a basement
Like an overdose

This feels like the night before the end of something vast,
A plane ride straight into a hot, nostalgic summer
Or Christmas Eve
A drop in my stomach
Like I could eat the world
Savoring the last moments before I leave your heart
I could tell the truth
Or break all the drinking glasses in the cabinet
Forget to pay the bills
I won’t need money or clear skin where I’m going

Poisoned fruit in your ***** eyes,
But really I am just an apple
Organic,
Full of green veins and soft, brown spots
They are ugly and particularly sweet
Coming from a life of white bread and red meat,
You pucker at the acid
And sugar

Plague rat,
Faded nineties autograph
On an Italian restaurant wall
If ruining my day was an Olympic sport,
You’d be on the cover of Men’s Health
Smiling in coveralls

You have a hold on me,
The look in your eyes is loveless
You have a hold on me,
How I love it

I cannot ever resist the velvet sweetness
Until I’m wretching into something shallow and barely one degree from the carpet
It shows in the violent colors of an underworld rainbow come from my jaw,
How I underestimate you and you dehydrate me for days afterward
I’m a fly in a humid plastic bag
I’m an ant with a breadcrumb breaking my back
With the top of my head and my toes
I feel a dangerous house
But I smell something to bite into
Harsh, giggling
Like honey whiskey

He rides in loudly, and all at once
Like a hurricane healed to summer air
I have never been more grateful for the violence
I’m barely awake,
I haven’t yet popped my arms and legs back into place
But when coming from his mouth,
I am made of marble,
I was never truly bent nor asleep  

I will never have anything better to do
Than watch as you lock into your armor
Cradling, for the needy day,
That which you have given to only me

You respect yourself so little that watching me love you completely, with all I have been given to give, made you lose respect for me too.

And what a dark fate that will be for you to meet.

If tears to the muscle build compounding resolve,
Their fibers sewing from blood new strength  
My lungs could hold an island afloat
My heart could pull a tank

I’ll move my feet and hands
One by one and side by side
Churn, flow
To make the lights flicker
The wheels go
A waterproof bag of pieces
Dragged through frames of time
Not yet in the room, and not leaving
Faithless lightyear eyes
Sleeping between plaster and wall
Leaking a sticky, red hunting trail
Through moments
From now,
They will only be moments

I wish you were someone that you are not

You are right there and I cannot have you

It may **** me to be inside any hands not grown from your golden body,
But I choose tigers
I give them a glossy mirror while playing a flute
Or harp strings
They finally rest
Hell,
They purr

Though it does make your eyes roll backward, and your stomach reject an entire day
If only you could see how I crush them
You’d be so proud of this flower
Given in bunches to poison kings
Coming to bloom on your kitchen table
Making your house into a home

I am Sun-roasted mahogany, and still warmed
Before the day even breaks
You are in the air and between every follicle
All amber, jungle-eyed, full of undiscovered life
Brand new species of whole love,
Growing from the body
Giving my preemptive brain honor to sleep
Rivers and roads abound in you,
Safe and a welcomed means of travel
To a Brand New World
To the place they always promised me

Though if war sprouted on the skyline,
You, the red mist,
I would gladly be a traitor
I would peacefully be ******

England dreams in bruises of sunsets,
Hydrated, ******
Running pomegranate and blue-black
I don’t remember the first time I chose this kind of cold
Maybe these icy feet
I’ve only just grown into