i've been waking up to desaturation all my life.
i don't know why but i've been
rolling over in the same grey-skinned body,
opening shoddy eyes, heart heavy
as a hangover. i climb into your chevy with
it in my hands. i know this is the fifth time i've lit
a cigarette since i quit, but my lungs needed the ash.
did you know, in a car crash, just one person
not wearing a seatbelt would worsen the casualties?
so if you see the casual ease with which i bare my chest,
know that the carnage of my reckless form,
hail in a storm of steel and violence, at least felt sorry.
the starry dark of a backroad, an explosion of light,
a bright metal supernova and colors even my eyes can't doubt;
we'll all find out exactly how heavy my guilt
is when the body sorrow built ascends through the windshield.

man seeking woman. man seeking what never was. man seeking a face he recognized in the crowd.

i was him. you were reaching out and i flinched. you offered, you vivisected yourself to prove devotion and bled—you didn't understand why i was bandaging and not climbing into your open heart. the crowd dispersed from the pews and i learned to love in bloodletting. we were bleeding for three years, taking our turns to patch and open wounds.

anemic on idolatry, we bled on the altar we built. sacrificial lambs unto ourselves—at some point the ritual is more important than the outcome. you always tell me you're dying for my sins but i always seem to end up on the cross.

man seeking the belief. man seeking the almost. man seeking the stability of a wound that never heals. man seeking what could've been, man seeking to reach out and grab hold and find warmth in skin instead of sacrifice.

i don't believe in soulmates,
but i think we came close.
skin to skin, i read your palm,
but how was i supposed to know?

what do you do when your red string
gets caught in the door?
i never could untangle it,
and i didn't know how to be loved by you anymore.

i ask constellations how you're doing
and dodge your calls.
in the summer, you'll trace my palms
and we'll defy stars as trivial.

there's always something about good things i want to ruin.
there's no version where orpheus doesn't turn around.
it's not so much precognizance but
digging up the same old burial ground.

it's not so much what you read
in between freckles and lines, but the sense
of connection, a familiarity of skin on skin
and a practiced willingness to drop the pretense.

breathe in incense smoke—
swirling carcinogen,
but not my favorite.
not by far, not when
bruised lungs run in the family.
smolder, smoke, ash, original sin,
a debt i am going to make you watch
me pay. i'm always playing the victim.
i read seduction, i breathe in incense,
to maintain an innocence
i never had. it just feels so religious to self-flagellate.
i speak in tongues and don't make sense,
i try to trace myself through the guilt,
and envy jesus.
at least he had
the nails as reference.
how many times you've done this before
is about the only difference
between being a martyr and deserving it.

i see myself -
unshaven and distraught, at peace with who i am and despaired by a world i saw coming but couldn't prepare for.
i see myself -
sitting in the old house, civil war ghosts whispering through the cracks in the dry red clay. sherman burned this town once and now i get to watch the sun do it again.
i see myself -
the hedges are overgrown and i never stopped smoking cigarettes. the shadows on the walls are mapped out, a mimicry of life in an empty heirloom.
i see myself -
head in my hands thinking about history. The Last Gilded Age. The Second Gilded Age. what good are comparisons if no one's left to draw them? how does the past make room in a world already strangled by its present?
i choke back -
the same addiction that made geraldine shoot herself. it occurs to me that i am probably the last person alive to remember geraldine ever existed. i think that's what drew me to history - i've always had the past living inside me. there's a whole family tree intertwined with my ribcage, like kudzu over tarred lungs.
i fill my -
flask with weedkiller. i inherit an open wound. i try to find my place in a history that no one will ever read.

i am trying to come to terms
with gravity
as i fall toward the floor
with the awareness of the your
face framed in the hall door.
that's an exaggeration—
there's a certain inaccuracy
in conversations about bodies,
personal and celestial, revolutions one around the other,
that is unavoidable due to limitations
of the form. so i like to be precise
where it can fit in between the
cumbersome dances we do.
i'm not falling toward the floor
but i might as well be. i can't tell you that.
what's wrong you ask again
but something i read about planets
is that they're much farther apart than the human mind
can even conceptualize. that most of space is empty
and cold as we dare to spin through it.
i'm thinking of the audacity of revolutions
and you just wanna know why i'm so sad.
i think about bodies. sinew and joints and the red
****** meatstuff that fills in the places in between.
a heart pumping blood and a mouth that refuses to admit it.
about the physicality, the weight of it sinking
into beds that aren't mine, bodies that aren't mine.
you're not standing in the doorway anymore, no one
stands in doorways forever. especially not
for someone who refuses ownership
of the space taken up by their own body. constellations
are outlines of disparate points someone tried to find a
story in. i'm not much better.
i think of heavenly bodies, i think of stars
but they don't tell me anything
i wasn't trying to deal with already.

i think what i'm trying to say is that
i wanna know what hand you write with.
that's what i'm interested in,
right, left, maybe even ambidextrous—
show me your birthmarks, and the
little scar you got when you were a kid.
there's a story in your body, on your skin,
and i want to listen to you tell it,
running my fingertips across your freckles
as if i were blind.