You can never skip an opportunity to call yourself that
Because you’re your ma’s son:
Didn’t get caught up in the tool shed
Got spiked through with the hooked art of repeating yourself instead

Should I feel insulted then
That these cracked, digited fringes
These rejects of your diminutive anatomy
Are how you love me?

You love me with the unvoiced, unexplained idiocy
Of fingers that make Mexican waves
To one particular song
And lure mine to come dancing too

You love me with the whorls where you keep your DNA
Counting the concaves in my skeleton:
Explore them, soothe them
Wonder if you made them

And I think you fear that
If you ceased to trace me as I grew –
A carpenter sifting through the age rings in my spine –
I’d only feel the dislocating vagueness
Of an absence too menial to be mourned.

“Cack-handed”
But I remember different:
I remember your hands like leather,
All heated and scratchy from your pockets,
Unhooking the problems from my mouth.
And how the weather’d teethed on them,
Gnawed away chunks down around the cuticles
Until they were dry and scarred like February –
February getting lost in its own bleak cavernousness

They stir the rag in the shoe polish,
And the burnt spoon in the bean tin.

I used to try to pinch them
But my nails were too soft
And your palms too crusted
But when they tell me “thick-skinned”
I shake my head and think
“No, beautifully cack-handed”

Your sentences border on senseless
And you are paranoid in every paragraph
How they perceive you

those fingers of yours are
shears and
these tendons,
strings

they weren't as fragile as
weak until you've boiled the meat; compress and
decompress
and now
they are torn apart
not for me and
not for anyone else just
for you

Be my siren.
Give me another chance.
Kiss me now,
My emotions will enhance.

I feel broken
Without your presence.
My heart is weighing more.
I need you, not silence.

You equals me.
Me equals you.
My soul pauses
Just to think of you.

This life is wasted,
Just like the others too.
Come, be my siren.
I will always, always be with you.

Sometimes I have to remind myself
I'm not better than you.
I'm just better than who you say I am.

Faded stars and bittersweet Thursday mornings
Where one end of this rope is tied to the dawn
And the other end has frayed and broken free

I find scattered amidst this sunrise all that I have hunted
Taunting me, delicately erasing hovering shadows
And exposing the darkness for the liar it has become

A fleeting slumber is the crux of my discontent
Where one eye opens to a world of majestic wonder
And the other opens to the aftermath of my dreams