Run your fingers on me
as you put your hand around my body
Press every vein - strings I have on me - hard and smooth!
until that sweet sap comes out like pure honey.

Savor the sweetness of my sap
as your body melt with it until
You and I will collide into the space
with our minds blown away into the milky way

Tightly, hold my body then let go of
the love that wakes every living dead man on earth

what a lovely thing it is
to know
you gave your heart
but not
your soul

yet you still lost it all
because you forgot
that when you signed
your heart away
your soul was
the fine
print.

this is what you get
when you try
to share
your life
with another.

its always there

sometimes
i get so happy
that i find myself
sad
again

how is it
that two things
that are so different
are so connected?

i saw you in a photograph
smiling like someone trying to be happy
i am not sorry for you

I know the quietest way
to crack an egg.
The softest way to close
a door. How to pour
the water into a tilted
glass so it doesn't splash
back. A bird chirps at
just under sixty decibels.
A light bulb sings at
fifteen. I dream
of polymer chains snapping
clean, recyclables humming
to each other at night
while they biodegrade
at a rate negligible
to the human timescale.
Twenty decibels: the chiral
calcite spiral of the snail
when it falls to the sand,
when it dies,
when a girl apologizes
for asking a question.

a mantra: I can do
things that hurt, I can
do things that hurt,
three miles in, feet
in the dirt, trying
breathe in, cold numb
swim, trying goodbye,
hello, subvert,
feet in the river,
feet in the dirt,
I can do things
that hurt,
I can do things that hurt.

quietly, in the mornings
with only your fingers
shades tilted in, the lapis
dawn that barely makes
it through, door ajar
studied, an open book quiz
unmentionables, spoken in
water drops
melted butter
shower steam
vanilla
milk
cinnamon.

before the sun
before breakfast
before the earth opens up like it does
take it with a grain of salt, with an ounce of optimism
the glass ain't even here, we have lakes
we have amber canopies, other hands that shield
lovers that reach for us mid-dream, us
they reach for us in sleep induced affection,
they may as well be reaching across continents
who knows how far away they dream,
fingers sliding across cello strings
they make beautiful music while
they are here, traveling limbos to find us
but we're here in the morning, in the quiet morning.



how to eat honeycomb.

there was once a spider in
my bathroom who wove
a thin globe around itself
for who knows what reason--

I've felt it slide over me,
a thick film, it happens
the way something suddenly
becomes a scar, you're there
for every moment that it
is red and puckered but
one day you find that
your body has taken
aim and fixed itself.

i imagine this is how
people go blind, like
someone has etched filigree
over my lungs and now I
breathe a little easier--
but something has gone
missing, i've always seen
my thoughts as people
and she is no different,
swaddled and taken away

i don't think there is a word
for the process, just the faint
inclination that some things
never existed, or did in another
year, another place, i've always
found myself here,
healed over, maybe
the single tremolo
wavering over my
shoulders, wet out
of a monsoon
usually
box elder leaves
like schools of minnows
diving and plunging

me.

there.