I found my voice in a pocket of oxygen buried in my gut,
it was a hot air balloon
backlit by the aura of my lungs,
my chest was the sky that coughed it up.

Knowing that we are water-based creations
spread thin
like the last spoon of pancake batter,
I wear my impermanence like Jupiter wears her red spot.
I wear my fears like continents wear mountains,
pointing them toward the sky,
hoping to someday adhere a sticker to my chest that reads,
THIS CAR CLIMBED MT. COMMITMENT

I have the scars to prove it.

My mother carried me like the last drop of water in a desert canteen,
there was no need for a soft spot; I was headstrong.

I brought the kitchen to the gun fight.
Held my hands to the stove top
turned my back to the knife rack
kept one foot in the door jam and my mouth to the bedpan,
just in case these words washed my mouth out.

Most people never get close enough to recognize
that the smile on my face is written in Braille--
but you've always been there with a blind eye
reading my innuendos
and holding me to my words.

When your marathon feet hit the pavement
it's a lot like Buddy Wakefield at a typewriter
striking the first letter of the word benevolence--

You taught me how to b b b b b in the moment.

Even at my most negative
when my body is a hearse,
this heart is a corpse
and this life is a road-trip from funeral parlor to graveyard,
so that I may have spent my entire life in the company of mourners,
who loved me.

Even at my most positive
when my body is a universe,
this heart is Hatch Shell located on the south bank of the Charles River
swelling with the sounds of the Boston Pops
and this life is everything leading up to the Big Bang,
so that I may have spent the entirety of my life in the company of creation.

Even on the night we met—same night I found my voice
we stayed up to watch Lake Michigan come to life in a pocket of oxygen
under a Chicago sunrise so inescapably underwhelming
it was covered by clouds.

But we were not disappointed.

Even though all of our rainbows have been stitched into flags,
draped over coffins
and buried by the same people who taught us to believe
in optical illusions.
Our hearts were not drawn by Jeremy Fish,
we're not weighted in fiction,
we did not have heartstrings rigged by Geppetto.

No, we were not disappointed,
this was nothing like (I still remember) when we learned
that we couldn't all be Mouseketeers.

Disappointment is a pastime that we reconciled
when we laid our grandmothers to rest
and recognized that their tombs did not believe in resurrections.

The past is a hot air balloon hoisting us up to a sky we'll never see.
I get it.
I'm not lookin' down.

We are old enough to know the truth.

The light at the end of the tunnel is behind us,
that's where we came from.
We are not running from it.
There's no looking back.

can't talk like a poet got
a foul mouth I spit blood
people think I'm simple
because I am

you would rather study human acrobatics
like you would rare animals
but their talk blinds your raised knife

curling onto a fake memory
I smell the burning intelligence
just to watch is convenient romantic

Name it.  It kills poets.

She walks next to me
like she'll walk next to me
forever.

There is definitely glass in the hammer
and my hands are cut and bleeding.
But we needed to drive down that road,
hide behind the earth,
and commit ******.

John and Paul and George and Ringo
are dead.
And we threw their bodies in the dumpster
and drove away.

If only there was more **** to break.
We need more **** to break.

I felt with one hand in your depths--
fathomless!--for an emblem, an anthem!
No other time but then
did every bright vestige touch my fingers
to be held close,
and now,
and forever!

Only later when I moved to breath did I find
I’d come up with only,
handwritten in ballpoint:

“Mahogany: A color which
may or may not have been
a precise descriptor of your sweater.”

It must be an interloping loyalty that grieves me,
as you claimed never to have been
a sensualist.
Yet you brushed my temple with wasp-nest lips!

How sad that your echo exists thus, solely thus;
It is, I think, a paltry token
of a transcendence so complete
that, for once, I did not ***** for color,
but had it kissing
my cold hands.

color camera filter gel
it's a black tower at tintagel
turns me every shade of dead
when i'm made to lay in bed

last night i fought so violently,
the neighbors left a note for me--
"the walls are thin here; from above
we could hear you two make love."

born too early, slept too late,
crows flocked to their dinner plate,
and i studied aristophanes
amidst a shrill cacophony.

wet and wind in winter's maw
i opened wide, but tigers' claw
caught a vain and made it sing--
heaven hurting, heaven sting

a vessel filling up with sand,
myth and man with mountain hands;
sipping from a fiery flagon,
how i began Year of the Dragon.