sunsets ripple across southern skies
like skipping stones across a pond.
i'm thinking about how we all die.
what will nothing feel like?
what did it feel like before?
i catch myself guessing -
the void and cold conjurings of a
scared temporary consciousness.
loneliness beckons and repulses me
in equal measures, existential inquiries
painting me into nihilistic corners.
is this just some brief gift?
i hem and haw and waste the light,
i become the universe i fear,
endlessly eating my thoughts,
embodying entropy as i gasp for air.

I-20's sparkling something special as
summer glares through my windshield.
my white knuckled grip is off season
but it's wrapped around my only stability:
the jerky steering wheel of a car that
needs its tires aligned.
the air smells like ripening southern summer and humidity drips like fruit juice down my brow. the sun pours into green eyes, sets them pale against the sclera.
i can't see what's directly in front of me,
but what's new.
windows down, eighty miles an hour
out of atlanta. i'm alone but even i'm pretending these tears are sweat.
i don't know where i'm going, i never have.
i just drive forward on the hot asphalt
and hope my tires will melt
and the clouds will part
and someone will make sense of it all.
summer was always her favorite season
but i guess that's just another reason
to want it over.

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.