In the darkness it's like you never left.
Thin masses of black hue
and blend amongst cluttered objects,
blurred curves of the bed frame
rendered indifferent from
the soft length of your leg,
equal and unseen in blackness.

Drawing lines toward the ceiling,
eyes, mouth, lips,
listening to small thoughts
played out against the boundaries
of sight and imagination,
shadows the same amongst
an unknowable darkness.

In the darkness it’s like you never left.
Indentations of shapes tickle
vague reminders of light,
passing hands through it,
settling quickly from the edges
of reality back into an endless
and eager memory.

The world spins in its own shadow.
Dusk settles across a landscape
that lifts its head forever
upward in prayer.

Existence echoes
along an ageless frame:
a bomb explodes; a child is born
to smiling strangers while an
old man gasps
back toward blackness,

a street light blinks red to green–
back again.

In small rooms, lovers
hurry to make what little
love there is left to make.

There had been a clearing in thick
of the old forest behind our houses
where we nailed pieces of wood,
stolen from neighbors yards,
to a nearby oak tree and climbing
up, up, up, about twenty feet,
to the lowest of the branches,
looked out over the gray roofing
of the houses and could see
the world from our secret perch,
feeling it then but not quite
yet understanding;

it would be better to have
never come down.

In dreams, you are back again;
deadbeat dog-days of a heat
that left us trapped with nothing
but the dry-cough staleness
of early afternoon.
The sweat evaporates as it falls
in unmoved puddles beneath you.
The horizon past the windowsill
holds faint outlines of a breeze
that never comes,
of a promise left unfulfilled.

In dreams, you are there again.
Wrapped in my shirt, too big
and loose at the shoulder.
You are knee-bent by the edge of the bed,
pulling hands through hair;
making love with your little movements,
heavy with the suffocation of
a hundred degrees pressing down
on the pretty, brown complexions
of skin taut against your temples.
Air-conditioning, out again,
gasping against the windowsill.

In dreams, you leave the phone to ring.
Your mother wants you home,
your father wants me dead,
we only want to be cold again
It can be a hard thing to find in the heat,
happiness.

In dreams, framed by the sun-soaked
sheets of the bed, thin and damp,
you almost smile. Dark eyes
lightening at the edges.

In dreams, we keep the shower
on all-the-way cold
through long, dry afternoons—
thinking of rain.

The days blur perilously close
to each other now.
The alcohol does not help;
helps other things.
Blunt force trauma has
swelled and colored
the gulf of skin beneath my eye,
hindering sight.
Disgust awaits the mirror;
a child shading in the
contusions of my face
with the wrong colors;
purples, sickly yellow.
Knowing how it should,
but doesn’t, look.

Faces of friends seem
to slip further away,
this memory failing
as cells burn and pop
atop the frying pan of chemicals
that I have become.
The drugs do not help;
help other things.
A tile floor, a dimming light.

Naked, she is a stranger,
and I am overflown
with nausea, apathy;
some thick welling of revulsion
pitted in the gut that I pray
is only toward her
This hatred does not help;
only any good for the writing,
ironic, unsure if there will
be a writer much longer,
anyway.

Another gray, black-eye sunrise,
******* and insomniac,
awake as the earth spins again onward
into the mutable mass of gas and plasma.
How many of them must there be?
The number will rise up
into the trillions, they say,
as the top continues its turn;
dizzying now and incomprehensible.
The sun bigger and bigger
slowly each time, growing
until this small marble
is overtook by some
dystopian beachballl of fusion
and fission, blistering away with
such anger; imbalance.

Hungover, contemplating ends,
I think the bullet may be alright;
regarded as painless if aimed well.
Imagining split-second blitzkriegs
of neural discomfort prior
to blackness, I dismiss the thought.
The sun is up fully now, stretching.
Red giants, they say are cooler
than their white counterparts,
but larger.

All the fights, from the bar
to the battlefield.
All the love, from the brothel
to the bedroom.
All the life, progress, movement,
everything and nothing;
muted by colliding hydrogen particles
emitting heat.
Is it so terrible to be irrelevant?

The birds flew south
early in August and
it meant harsh winter—
your father always
knew to watch the birds.
But young, and ignoring signs,
we stayed in shorts
until the first snow.
Even then, hopped
about in the cold
with fair warning
and wondered what
love could be found
amid the snow.
We watched together
as it melted in the little
fingers and notches
up your spine,
my rough hands careless
as they broke the boundaries
of your back.

The birds flew south early,
years later now, nature proving
herself yet again
as the cold came quick.
Your father was dead by then—
I had seen him buried
where winter could all but touch him.
Still, we thought of him all the same.
Still, the birds left all the same,
with him and without him.
Nature moves curiously and
passes in gray August fog
towards the thick, unseeing winter.

Amongst it once more,
I couldn't help but remember
the fear, steeped in passion,
as he caught us making love
that first time in the old shed
behind the farmhouse.