I could touch ground to the idealization that all love is impossible;
not the kindest touch of palms against the breastbone of my soul,
could heal this immaculate desire and terrible crushing feeling
of being alone. Not even the notion of dry lips against even dryer ones could form and mold back together the splintered pulsing place in my brain that still aches for you.

Dying at noon with a boiled shot glass of ***** seemed fitting.

The ever growing heated birth in the sky blinded out the grave-****** silver of clouds. I wanted to reach out my overdosed arms, push that fiery ball of hate and replace it with something much more of grace: The moon, the moon in all her calm and peaceful beauty.

But I was left with the devil, it seemed, the devil and the still fixated image of your smiling face behind my clinched shut eyelids.

I prayed for a redeeming act of elegant forgiveness. If not from you, than at least from the one we both tried so hard not to believe in, the one we so desperately tried to tie a knot around and leave slaved to the broken fence out back.

God: he seemed too barbaric and cruel to even think of, but he still, lie there, in the back of our minds, keeping some part of us both safe and alive and breathing.

The ash of you is kept in a jar that doesn't speak or move or try to resurrect itself back into the loving boy that had once possessed it. And being alone here, trembling numbly back and forth on this creaking rocking chair, almost seemed like a thing of torture. You were uncountable miles away from me and I was sewn in frugally to this wooden piece of rotting slab wishing more than ever I was a ghost.

A ghost that haunted the deserted halls where you might be.

The sky should be bathed in black nothingness, instead, it washes my skin with unholy punches of toasted warmth.

I close my choking, pleading mouth shut and let the warm salt of my body dissolve in hail like figures down my face.

Accepting your loss was more an impossible act than finding out how love, the most ferocious, corrupt perception of life, could still somehow exist, out there, in the world full of tremendous hurting.

-- mapping the world,
freckle by freckle
with my tongue,
I have found there are four of them
at various points across your belly, and

have I not allowed them entry
into this angry constellation
of teeth, and raw degradation
that has become my mouth

in the absence of you

I have digested them wholly,
never speaking of their beauty, for I
can not possess what I can not crawl into.

-- understanding the stipulation that what is
temporarily borrowed is not freely given,

again, it is you who are
so good at burning for me
what affection can imitate.

there’s a boy I love,
the boy doesn’t speak,
the boy is pale, a body full of bones.

his ****, limp
his eyes, weeping
his form, skeletal and twined.

i want to dissolve him into body wash,
clean my body with his.

there’s a boy,
a touch of 25 to his grace.
the boy kisses like he’s carving gold into cement.

he makes art out of willowing branches of thighs,
out of dove-necked wrists,
out of a sloped, vining neck.

there’s a boy,
mute; but as loud as roaring packs of waves.

there’s a boy i love,

even when i swore love was what I was most afraid of.

the skyscrapers of oak, swaying,
the soft, peaceful melody of the wind,
branches, extending, wrapping around themselves,
in an act of dance, a twirl around the whirling, impassable sky.

fallen leaves, raining down,
painting the ground an open-flesh red.

the wind chime, the banging pipes,
the unquestionable need to be a part of nature.

the ominous ocean,
the drowning sailboat,
the screaming seabirds.

the nature drags you to where it wants you to go,
the clouds cast a scolding look,

“Listen,”
It hums,
“Listen to me.”

you open your arms,
pressing your fingers tightly together,
bruising each bone there.

you lean back and let the breath of earth,
steal you away.

this is how God discovered bird.

The swell of your feverish hands over mine.
Sweat soaking into my skin.
I’m clutching every part of you I can grasp,
Every part of you I can fit into my palm.

We’re sitting beneath the hollow tree,
Beneath the ocean of a sky,
Beneath the screaming black-billed cuckoos.

We don't say a word because we don't need to;
Just silent prayers burned between us,
Scarred into pale, malnourished bones.

I look at you as your sloe-eyed gaze
bores into the mountains of clouds swimming above us.

I want to kiss you,
But all I can do is lay my head on your shoulder,
Wishing I could build a home out of your collarbones.

I don't ever feel safe anymore.

Except when I’m forgetting everything, with you.

At dusk,
I tried to unlearn the way the gold in your skin,
Possessed your face in scintillant rays of spots.

I could count each one if I had the time,
But you’re already turning your spine stuffing back away from me,
And skipping back home

Without the bother or concern to look back.

the evidence of ****** is soaked into your skin.

the red of his blood feels like lava on your dried hands.



sweetheart. pretty boy.

                      why in the world did you have to go?



The revolver has planted its body on the tile,



the same cold tile your own body is sinking into.



i love you,

but it's too much for my own good.



i suppose that's how i ended up on this floor.



his skull is punctured in like a never ending cave,

you want to dig out your eyes so you wouldn't have to see where he had gone.



                  he's too far gone to be found, anyway.



crying doesn't feel like pleading for him to come back,

it feels like pleading to join him.



but the gun is out of bullets.



The gun is out of bullets.

I couldn't seem to find where you had gone.

The road narrowed down to a small passageway in the woods,
getting lost in the crowds of trees surrounding it.

I walked until my feet ached,
until the gravel beneath my naked toes cut ****** rock sized openings into my skin.

You were nowhere to be found,
I realized that now,
but I kept walking,
as if each step could somehow guide me to you like a compass,
pulling me in the right direction,
promising an answer.

I wanted to know where they had buried your body,
where your still decaying bones lie a clean mess inside the earth, but I couldn't find it,
I couldn't find where you had gone.

The moon had once before,
promised me a source of light,
but now,
it only provided a terrifying, crowding darkness.
I wanted to lie underneath it,
urging her out of the sky and onto me.
I wanted something heavy to plunge me underground
so I could worm myself to you,
find the body that belonged more to me than it did, you.

I just wanted you back,
and if I couldn't even have that,
than a piece of you to hold onto;
something I could look at to know you were once a living being, once a boy I loved and always will.

I walked back then,
after allowing myself the refusing will to move on.

In the impala, on an abandoned road,
I pulled your cold blanket over my own decaying body,
trying to wrap the ghost of you around me.

Pushing my nose into the wool,
I smelled the last remaining parts of you.

I closed my eyes,
not willing to imagine the small space where you should be,
vacant.

After all,
how were you supposed to wake up there with me,
when I was half gone myself?