I’m going now,
I told you.
Your eyes were
heavy in the cold.
There on the platform,
only a shivering
embrace remained.
Our bodies united
against distance.
In a swarm of tears
and snow-speckled hair,
I brought my lips
to your ear and
whispered goodbye,
and that I love you.
Like a *******.

Tania slurps her cheap beer and uncrosses her legs,
exposing fresh bruises from the soup factory.
She outlines them in marker and draws
a smiley face on one located on her right thigh.
These bruises tell me that my life is composed
almost entirely of bad decisions, she says,
replacing the cap on the marker. I ask how
a decision could form such a perfect,
purple circle. Between swallowing
beer and peering into the rain,
she burps. I can't say, but--
I mean, do you want
to have ***? Later on
I drive her to the
hospital and I visit
a therapist. For
a few months.

As the rain batters the car
sighs born in a
love/hate stalemate
weigh down the air

Forests surround the parking
lot, protecting
our thoughts, nothing
saves me from you

Words spoken incompletely
float in the clouds
of sad warm breath
and ghosts turned to flesh

Limbs untangle and reach for
the moon, stereo
cherubs sing tunes
of sweet death metal

Each day I fly far
from the nest.
Through commerce,
through industry --
consumers of
human identity,
I pass unnoticed
as if a shadow
in a forest.

My body lifts,
made strong by your song,
and the fire

building in me flaring in my carrying me
                                                                         back
feathers intact from
the cracked cement
and metal, bent --
the brambles that creep
on our bodies in sleep.

Your breath — a sugary cloud,
crossed quietly between us,
though received as a gust
As it entered my mouth

You slipped away, your image
faded as if in mist
so sudden, that kiss
We had before the bridge.

At rest
     nestled by a
    crescent dream

You
hover and steal
                   Me

I spy your
theft and disappear into your
  lips

I return with a
kiss at your door
            soon adorned
            soon reborn

When these evening faces float and
fold and their orbit is in reach of the
foam coughed on the beach,
the cyclical physics in the
diodes implode, each edifice
saunters into sleep behind them.

Tomorrow
the city erupts, full enough
for gutters to bleed, abrupt
strikes seen among
the chain links and
trash heaps.
Tonight,
they're witness to a
cruel mother's steel belly
rocking in crude oil labor,
and her youthful light who

leaps to spy how
its birthpains coax a
body into another -- to
share what do the
sea and sky. When

Gravity herself weaves
a celestial web above, and a
fledgling *******
bed below, it tucks them
softly, safely, neatly
into their human details

so deeply a cry is heard. It is the
ocean trapped in itself alone,
so envious in the brackish tomb.