I think we buried him here.
No, no. Don’t dig him up.
Sometimes when it rains the earth opens up and blood pours out.
It’s like flesh, you know?
It’s getting harder to breathe so the pores have to open wider every fall
and more and more blood rises.
The other day the electricity in the city died.
No, not just the lines.
It was like a pulse.
Every electronic device failed
and suddenly we all saw ourselves reflected in our screens;
cellphones, televisions, laptops.
Everyone was so scared.
I remember a child gripping his knees.
Mum, mum, he repeated, but she didn’t reply.
I listened for a minute
and did nothing.
Hey, cheer up.
Some say at the end of every year, all the dead skin we’d shed to that point forms back into itself.
Living, breathing beings indistinguishable from their hosts.
No one knows if they remember their pasts,
if they are born as blank slates or prefigured individuals
destined to repeat the same mistakes,
over, and over, and over.
One day they’ll take over the city and we’ll be out of jobs.
They’ll forget everything we spoke of today and drill deep into the earth.
The flesh will split so cruelly it won’t ever knit back together again,
and blackened blood will carry skyscrapers into the earth.
Don’t be sad. It’s inevitable.
Think of it as returning to the womb.
A pure
unending
nothing.

Last night I read your poem
in bed instead of writing
like I'd said I would.  I
had to start over twice
because my eyes aren't
as good as my heart
when it comes to stopping
and starting at pauses
heavy with losses.  Lost
causes and me seem to be
your specialties. Especially me.

The doctors told her: “Leukaemia”.
More cancer? So I munched up Molly
and chain-smoked Benson
in the night club outdoor area.

The lights were stunning,.
We marched a half mile in heels
over frosted ground with knocking knees,
looking for people to please.

New Year’s Eve.
A house filled up to the brim
with big, fat eyes and dancing lovers
in a horrid estate in Sligo town.

2016 rang in, triumphantly.
I was surrounded by beautiful people
drowning in loud music
slept at 8am and dreamt of her.

Let me write my books of poetry,
Sing into a microphone with no connection.
Let me wash my hair in the rain
As a means to get myself dry,
To find a connection;

To cleanse my skin with ancient water
That tiptoed the forest before Man.
Let me punch the code of my identity
Into the melody and not the spreadsheet.
Allow me to **** all the people

I was before I felt alive.
Old means for yesterdays,
Ends that caused me
To start over again.

Let me send letters to New England,
Let me drink coffee on the pedestal
Of a day spent sober-
Buckle of the grass in the wind,
Mind lost to cloud canopies
And transparent heartbeats.

Let me kiss a foreign tongue
To learn that all lies taste the same.
Let me take off my clothes
When I am alone, simply to remember
That I can.

Moon: a companion,
Windowsill vigils at dawn,
Medication for the side effect
Caused by the cure.

Let me wash up in the Jovian seas
When my feet are rooted to the Earth.
Let my mind pester the working day
With dreams for tomorrow,
With catastrophes blacklisted in the sky.

Let me write my books of poetry,
Songs of sadness with no tune.
All the feelings I forgot,
All the passion I outgrew.

There is a man in my dreams, always. He is neither foreign nor familiar. He never speaks but on the occasion that he does he is not boastful;
His lip never trembles or bleeds.
"All my days are the same, except some" he whispers.
" I should've been a woman, I should've been a man. I should've been anything but solitary knee caps & jail cells. I've lived in nothing but crowded apartments, fed on the flooded chatter of open windows!
Those moments where your heart is a hummingbird & the girl you love keeps skinning her ******* knee & for that there are heads being scalped."
I never reply to these confessions. He could be a lawman or a taxi repairman & it wouldn't make a difference because his missing teeth that he covers with dentures & the eyes that never fully close tell me I don't have to. This is not my show, not his airtime on the television. There's never a punchline, you see. His sins are never absolved & the only redemption he gets is that there's never dirt under his fingernails.
"I have lived enough" he continues
"To know that the samurai sword you try so hard to use for defense is only a swollen reminder that you've always been background noise at dinner parties, you don't know where to go without bumping into someone; the time is not over yet.
"There is no romance in finding your war and conquering it. My mother used to kiss me on the lips & my father used to beat me with a stick. You'd think these calluses would turn into poetry people would never be ashamed to read but my hands never stopped touching dirt."
He believes I'm listening, believes I understand. Looks at me & doesn't see a child; doesn't untangle the confusion inside the pockets of my dress. This, is the only time honesty counts.
"Somewhere between the hangovers & choking on all the keys I saved in coat pockets I couldn't figure out whether this was worth remembering, worth regurgitating to my children or women on bus stops
"I used to beat my wives & pretended that god enjoyed these charades; that my knuckles wouldn't feel so delicate, wouldn't be this tough if I wasn't designed to be. I looked at their cherub faces & all I could smell was gun powder, for this I never held a gun."
I looked at this man, cloudy-eyed. This man who belonged to no one; who never blew the dust off my hair but instead flicked ash onto my shoelace. This man with no name who forced me to hate him and yet when I closed my eyes there was only tenderness.
I wanted nothing more than for him to tell me something that made me comfortable in my own bed again.
"You see girl, you soon come to expect rooms without windows, people like burial grounds, that the shimmer doesn't last forever.
One day it's 9 p.m. on a ******* Friday night and you feel like a hospital rug, like a ****** motel carpet, like all the floorboards where your wife said the money you have to offer is not worth to die for and then what do you got?"
I wake up alone.

The city was hungry. A mewing came from an alley. A hollow exchange.
The innards of the district had been gutted by libertine sons.
We were scared of the silence, so we filled it with shootings, and lynchings, and stabbings, and rapes.
You came an empty reflection. It was the night before the bombs fell. I remember the way my atoms shifted. You lying there in the morning.
We fell into one another, like rabid dogs at corpses.

Limbs lined the streets.
You were distant that day. I broke ******* climbing over a fence, and lined them with the rest.
The radio tower looked abandoned.
You told me three years later you didn’t care either way. I walked you to the bridge and watched you swim the Styx.
I’d never cared from the start.

The world ended soon after.
The moon’s belly cracked, guts spilling onto the earth.
Children pelted one another with flesh. Parents stood in doorways, smiling.
The swell stretched infinitely, reaching neither peak nor fall.
I fell asleep on your grave, nestled in the cold of yesterday’s ache.

If I can find a way
To claw deep enough into my mind
I swear I can reverse time
Go back to a picture
Of a curly haired boy in forest green
Before we knew what growing up would be
We could hate our parents' choices under string light ribbon trees
Share secrets in smokey backyard plywood sheds
Drive home and feel the sky pierce through our chests and
Maybe I could even draw your neck on my arm
With all the shadows that used to hit it in the concert hall
Maybe if we time things perfectly -
Go back to the high school parking lot, football field, basement
Things would be exactly as they were
I don't want to forget what you looked like when maybe you loved me
Everything is your memory -
Plaid shirts and yarn wrapped wrists
Christmas lights and ****** knuckles
***** and frosted windshields
Everything goes from yesterday to a year ago then two