i read like a thermostat
i feel cold shrill of eyes
hot blisters of souls

i’ve seen aplenty

fully literate to the hunger
inside denim of men
with twenty tongues

pulling their weight
like untrained dogs

they lick my face to a swell

heating and cooling
my metals expand
silvers contracting

but I can very much tell

who is ready
who is not

some do
some talk

if you'd like
to open me wide like a mouth,
be mean with your smile

to get my thaws down to feet,
**** fire to the wind

with the door
wide open

let
it
all
hang

i’m very keen on intense
i salute a heavy gut
and the confidence of a mutt

an appetite

and if I’m truly your win,
jackhammer
the thermostat
out of the wall

get the wires all bent
and with violence
cement

the
type
of
love
that
knocks
me
dead

completely illiterate
i don’t want to think

I wonder how many people have ran the stop sign
on the "corner of happy and healthy," or who has held
that feeling of wrong at gunpoint and tried making demands.
These are bottom of the drawer days when you join the heap
in the closet, where your mismatched shoes live, the
background music bleeding from the score.

I said I wouldn't write about suicide anymore.
I wish I would have kept the old poems I wrote
because memory never serves me right, and I'm liable to
make the same mistakes, like when we met at the
atrophy of empathy, the misplaced apostrophe in
a long line of ****** letters. Mama always said, sometimes
you just gotta grit your teeth.

Another moment, another day that stretches into even
more still, and the sensation of bubbling and spilling over,
when the ground feels less like the ground and more
like a tightrope. You thought things would be different,
but they're not. You thought there would be some
order to it all, some rules for being, but here we are, scrambling.
Here we are, feeling for a light switch in a very dark room.

Journal ramblings, everything a corner, the sins that wait
for you outside the confessional booth while you repent.
Hold this for me, you said. I am still holding this for you,
so climb inside the gun cabinet and make yourself comfortable.
You’re going to be here awhile.

The psychologists and psychiatrists go for a drink and talk
about the nutcases while I throw straw wrappers
their way. Maybe they do not know this winter, but I do.
I know the depth of something flat and how it feels to snap
and be snapped. I have built us a city and watched it burn,
turned it inside out, inversion of inertia, speeding toward the
thing that lies underneath the surface, amorphous shapes
and blurs of color you claw at for hours.

I was going to tell God to take a hike but I showed him
to the bus stop instead. Small mercies, I only wanted
a little miracle. Can you blame me? But there are prices to pay,
always prices to pay, even when your credit is ****, so you
drive away instead, past the city, watch the green blobs blotting
the landscape, the creams and beige of the field making
your breath catch, the sun glinting off the wheat. You can barely
see it, but you can see it, and you want to slam on the brakes,
recollect the fleeting scene before it escapes.

This isn't what you wanted.
This isn't what you dreamt for yourself,
but this is what you have.
Scoot closer to me. I want someone to ride this out with.

i made love to the beach
and i thought of you
its airy wind reminded me
of the time you came and went

i made love to the wind
for it sprinkled over me
like a thousand winters
harsh and cold

i made love to the sun
again and again
forever addicted
souls forever mended

i made love to the sky
for it loved me so effortlessly
it had been my morphine
just like how you used to be

(b.d.s.)

two bodies
pausing in virtual realities
colors tangle
as love falls

effortlessly.

(b.d.s.)

A quiet recklessness,
undone seat belts and unlocked doors,
how midnight sits in your mind like
the hands of a clock are holding it there.

It's a different music now, a change
in how the dream tastes, the way
everything feels like sandpaper.
You swore you could see
from underneath the dark of your eyelids.
Go back to sleep, I said.

Someone asked me
what faith was. I said it was an act
of surrender. We have faith
in what owns us. You asked me
what faith was, but I couldn't
look you in the eye.

I remember you liked
your socks to hug your toes.
I remember I liked how you looked
when you told me that,
bathed in a beam of refrigerator light
like a helicopter search, the corner
of your mouth twitching upwards
into a lopsided smile.

It begins like this; It ends like this.
God spit us out of his mouth.
God sent a flood to wash us clean.
God made us from dust, and we still haven't
recovered.

You can't drive me out of Eden
without driving yourself out.
You drove us out of Eden, and I
hate you for it. You drove us out of Eden,
and I love you anyway.
Figure that one out.

You don't really know who you are
until you lose it.
Spilled milk, it's sad, you know?
We forget, we do, everything
except this, the way it settles
in your chest, your heart
working overtime to pump through it.

I have regrets, but
you know that already.
The tumble of words from a
desperate mouth and the
letters still stumbling
home half-drunk, naive.
If I knew you were going to leave,
I would have kept my *******
mouth shut.

I have regrets.
The night the moon wouldn't show
its face and how a confession
felt less like a confession when
mumbled into the side of your neck.

I am still waiting for you, still
counting sheep after they are sheared,
blinking at the shrinking horizon inside you.
Maybe if I could touch you again,
I'd find the braille there that would
make me understand.