Across the high seas I would sail
where even the winds meet their end
over worlds of whales and dovetails
just to see you by the weekend.

Drowning all along the way in dreams
our lives that have only just begun
in our minds just seven nauts downstream
from a hometown we've since outrun.

My dear nameless hero, sleeping
underneath quilts of blue lapis
stitched by lustful sirens weeping
so please, won't you sleep with me?

all my life
i’ve dreamed
of visiting the ocean

now that i’m here
with the girl i love
why can’t my heart stop beating?

maybe it’s because i rented her
a cent for every heartbeat

20 million heartbeats ago
she was mine
now
she needs to get ready for her next client

******* mami

homeless, no
metropolis without a home
blaring and clinking and laughing
lights sharp like daggers
me and strange men—and
you
blinding
motorcycle

red, yellow, purple, neon
all blurs together
then, music, like iceland, like
a flooded jungle, drowning
I let go,
take me away

you are my key,

---

gun in hand
orchestra in other
and bach and beethoven in between
I'm sure we heard the same organs that day
but you, other hand on bible
prayed

why hadn't I?

my actions will have consequences
.

---

my only chance

test after test
failure after failure
higher
and
higher
suffocating desperation
I
grab on and
never
let go

**** you, and
I'll
be

free

Function—
where time slows itself amongst the spring petals,
suspended in disbelief, a viscous clarity, a freezing *******,
where even physali and gerbera meet their maker.
And, for such, too, do I pray, world orb in hand,
rattling from its industrial chain links,
an inhospitable world, the only one I know.

It is a world
that I would tuck under my collar, the subtlest bump
raising eyebrows amongst all at the orphanage
for fear I was one of the loved, the created,
the different, unlike them:
one night, one mistake, and nine months of regret.

Forme—
I do not know my maker.
I do not know why she made me.
But I'm sure that it wasn't easy,
amidst the blizzard,
in a world not unlike my own,
with nuts and bolts and brains
and all that.

"To get a writer to fall for you, you just have to write about the moon!"

So she chirped—and so I will write about everything but,
like her ****, which I've never seen, but I imagine
could be a whole-*** natural satellite all by itself
(that's why they call it mooning),
the kind of satellite that brings all the boys to the yard,
all the boys who look for the NEOWISEs and Hale-Bopps in the night sky.
If I wanted to date a *****,
I would ask for Freud, and he would ask about my mother,
and I would wish that she was divorced and single.

Hell no, I don't want a writer falling for me.
I don't want anyone to fall for me.
I want to drag them down myself, into pits of mud and tar,
two grimy pigs slobbering and kicking and falling over each other.
I want the kind of love that lasts just a single night,
a night where all the snakes and swans and bears in the sky come alive,
where every corner is a new musical, every step a new circus,
where the flutes and pianos and violins blare just as loudly as the sirens chasing us,
where time is bottomless as mimosas.

I like to imagine the sky above me, a canvas,
floating in the sea of the sylphs, and I,
a paintbrush, white and orange on blue, and green
when I steal from the fields and farms of unsuspecting families,
and red, too, like the dirt under unsuspecting families,

—like on the hill to the pond when I first met you,
a blank canvas colored the colors of the rainbow, like
your voice, your eyes, your dress of feathers, flowing,
a crayon of light on the asphalt of life,
dyeing, dying, the color of Orion's bow-hand
as he slings your legs, one meat crayon after another,
one color after another, and finally you, my most beautiful,

—and as you looked toward me with eyes of dusk,
I looked across from my triangular wings of summer,
and saw that the night sky is black,
just as the asphalt is but a grave for crayons of the rainbow
because too many humans are artists.