sounds of the engorged worm’s lumbering steps,
they pierce not so stinging as the golden glow of orbs outside your window.
Quietude will find no home here.
neither will that longed-for sense.

what we want,
the ‘soul sleep,’
rests further,
further still, and away from finger tips,

gently rest me in myself,
to sweetly mine the interiors of subterranean caverns,
within which, we held exiled domain for millennia before we were men.

For a few minutes,
I sat and had a full-on conversation
with a voice on the other end of the phone call
that may have been just a recording.

His voice was...perfect.
It lacked any of the audible stretch marks
an organic, troubled human could produce.
It floated, lilting.

His mouth sounded as if it had made its home on a strong, defined jaw.
Within it, two rows of pearlescent stones .

My own lips quivered, anticipating what it would feel like to have this mouth opera bellowing hot air, down, further.
It had finally happened.
I'd fallen in love with a ******* voice that was trying to sell me life insurance.

shortly before your cannon shot onto the surgical table,
the huddled mass of you
caught a glimpse of the eventuality.
‘other’-light razor lip
down the french door hinges of your chest.

when ash from the micro fires sets,
it is that indelible ink that will plague you,
through years of intimate stares at this,
the defining mark of your forehead
when it kissed
something on the other side of divine.

now it's my turn. I feel no different. No one else remembers that name but me. I don't know how that makes me feel. It's like objectively, the whole thing never happened, that it was another machination of my own will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

my skull is heavy in my head. It solidified into copper some time during the night, and whenever I walk through my days, my head bobs this way and further, and on the sides of streets, people glance for a few seconds before returning to their own thoughts of hardened skulls within their own sloshing head-cavities.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'shepherd me a sheep, I, near my god, beyond my hopes, beyond my fears, from death into life,' as i remembered it wrong, bone rattle in a brick alley three years this thursday.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~

the division between days, illusory, quietly reclines itself between us, so deep and historic that our eyes see it time immemorial, forgetting that it is itself one continuous day, the breadth of it, this our time, that if left unhindered, it would have extended sloping and tumbling in its eaves and want of stars sailing for a morning. you and i were both there, for we were the nascent point from which all the souls fell from.

what lingers wanted is the smell of grass,
and the bell-ringing laughter that cascades
over steps i’d fallen down minutes before.

and what i want most is for you
to tell me what you see when your eyes shut,
the places you are when our eyes shut to you,
the infinite mass and space quietly tucked away,
beneath your brow,
beneath tendon, vein, and tissue,

tell me the colors of indigenous, endangered flora growing in this world of yours

I, naked
tremble before you
and deafening is my cry.

you will take me once,
as others have
Memorize my epicanthic folds while
I, fingers-curved,
travel your twin laugh line Ganges.

then the river dries,
several million strands of water,
cut from heavenly head
so that only two or three remain,
angel hair limp and lithe against the clay earth.

funny how you can stretch out famine for years.

atmospheric,
and actually quite lovely
or selcouth,
either way, it's time for us to retreat back into ourselves,
to fold delicately into, in two, in three segments,
tucked away until melting ice slides, skin-sheet
off our hairless arms
we yawn before sun gods then,
lids closed, yet light penetrates with branch-veins
so amber and pulsating.