i saw the sun torn open
she is seeing gold
tasting sounds
too bright for me to understand
sunspots and radiation
too bright for me to look at
so i smell for music and listen for her shadow

i want to tell her that she is beautiful
but nothing makes sense
when the sun opened everythingi
mixed around and i can’t stop
I am singing in my sleep about hearing her pass
or tasting her sounds
but she is gone

she wants nothing between us to change
but she is the sun and feeds
The crackling broken earth and dwarfs my point of light
but things change and seasons
are seasons and I’m hearing the leaves
growing in and the pollen sings
on the wind.
I try to forget

my cat and i sing a duet of
falling hair in spring and i count the smells
and sounds i can see from the window
as she holds to busy life
Worships Ares’ shirts to her nose
She doesn’t reschedule our dates
when I miss her, i turn on a lamp instead, pretending it is her face

I wait for another season to pass and she peeks from behind the clouds
she sings her lips to mine as she ties me to her whims
She wears my kiss like a badge
The sounds I make under the impact of her touch are like music
I am a star, but I will never be flawless, male, tall in her eyes. I will never be him. Things are always changing. I am always changing.
She is always beautiful.

She scorches my skin and I blister under my tongue and I long for a wind or tsunami
A change
I wish I had not tasted how disappointing she could be
Saying she is made to love a planet, not star
I wish I had not seen how ugly the dark spots of the sun could be
I don’t sing anymore.

Heavy magic is happening
Fat thick rain finds window screen and splinters in pieces.
I watch them baptize a line of yellow ladybug corpses, a ceremony without a religion
they call it an act of god
It is a miracle that no one prays for,
a worship service no one attends.

Wailing tornado siren calls, a despondent banshee across the field behind my house
Gathering my family around the emergency storm supplies, watching storm trackers trace geometry runes onto weather maps like wizards

Heavy wall clouds that we are swirling around us like cloaks - fearing the cyclone, waiting for the touchdown moment like wheat bowing down to reach under red clay, rooted but unable to stop trembling

A tree that bore my carved name lost it’s arm to the twisting wind, my neighbor’s houses destroyed under the next days sun
But

I am somehow untouched by them,
they flatten the earth around me, but I still stand,
Three have sent me flying down half flooded backroads,
hammering heart

I held every day they let me go, unharmed as a mercy.
They know their children when they see them

I am born of their heavy magic
smell of eerie and purple
shiver of danger before the storm
whip of trains howling past you
that breaking under the cyclone winds,

Have you ever been chased by a thunderstorm? His eyes flash like Lightning, his hands are like Thor’s hammer,
I think that it is all show and no danger,
did you know that heat lightning is just too far away to hear his thunder
you don’t know what danger you are in yet. The only thing you can do when you encounter such power bearing down on you is call on the heavy magic you were born of to baptize you.
To take you.
To escape him I summon the storm, the danger, the rage
Leave destruction
Shattered lamp in my wake
Hands made of wind and ether.

I was born a wall cloud on watch,
wind in my veins, wet hair, electric skin
I pay the price for my generational curse
I look over my shoulder for my damage,  
spiraling, breaking,
loss of control.

I want to be a cloud again, before I summoned this birthright.

You dug a well for my bones
Blackened my lips with ashes and fire too choking to swallow
You have expelled me from the golden lining of your veins
Shattering my jaw in your teeth
It is broken mirror pieces clinking on pepto bismol pink seashell tile in my childhood bathroom

My shattered pieces can’t fit from where they came anymore

something in me was right
Otherwise you wouldn’t come back to the garden
Over and over
toying with the idea of my worth
But I am not waiting
For you to approve
For you to take me In
Feed me
I have grown tall

I don’t think of you as home
And I don’t think of the mystery of belonging
Because I have become wild
Digging my own burrow
Finding soft grass to lay on with my mates
A home like this cannot be torn down

the old house
It is melting away like the house of Usher
Into the rust belt dirt

in the garden
I see the broken pieces in the sun
And the pieces don’t mean anything to me
Like me, they don't belong to anyone
But they are not able to change
I can still change

I could drink it all down
swallowing in
pride in my draining
look how strong
I've grown even in
this body this body
Preforming this art
wish whispered into your mouth
instead of your ear

I remember
laying under a tent of your shirts
stretched thin
Now you act like it's your skin I peeled rind
you demand so much in return
Steeply
spending the treasury of my blood
you need to take responsibility
bull without a ring
without cause
you fight anyone you think wrong
spinning but who bucked who

you’re the original revival
The phantom
phase
in my museum of love
you're now an exhibit
I like to visit
trailing
my hands on the velvet ropes
I have to buy a ticket from the front desk to see the tour
because you don't know my face
a stranger stealing glances

turned for a moment
you were gone
the exhibit closed permanently
I don't know how to say goodbye
because I hadn't said hello in a decade
our ancient bones
in the dumpster out back
the only value left
gilded coffin that I built
hoping we could fix tragedy

you go to your museum
somewhere in a hallway to the bathroom  
by the gift shop
I hang on the wall
you pass by
but you never stop

You are the spines of a prickly pear cactus
Too small to see
Embedded in my skin
But my body usually pushed the cactus needles out over time
You’re still there
I never pushed you away

Our love is Schrödinger’s cat,
not sure if it is hiding
before it was unleashed from the box
We never talked about it, I just hold you in my dreams
Dead on arrival
Waking to nothing

The closeness of you is the tattoo machine sting
A good kind of hurt
It leaves me with art spilling on my skin
You leave me with glowing in my bones
But unlike tattoos I’m never healing
raw and rough with the repeated hum of shading
Trying to make a gray area where there is none
Bones can’t hold ink, only holes

You are not sending a secret code reaching out across the rift
A divide carves between us like the ache of Pangea’s faults
But you were born into this new world
You don't know of a time when the land held hands
You didn't feel the rending
It was real for me

A gray morning fog
Mist shrouding the top of the buildings, mountains, creeping into valleys
I am sure that they are still there, waiting
I didn't realize I was waiting
Waiting for the wheel to spin around
For your smile to sun me again
Maybe
“I love you”
will evaporate from my lips
without you even noticing it

You do not know that my crush is still riptide
our love is dragging me under
but the waves lap at your ankles
As you watch so many ships

This is the film I never put in my camera
The alternate timeline
You can see it in the corner of your eye
And on the lips of the dead that gather in graveyards
Telling you of the world in which they and we are whole

Our love is sunspot
Our love is electromagnetic pulse
Our love is sending me spiraling into the deep nothing
Our love is dying star
It will become something else in time
I wish “I love you“ would evaporate from my lips
But it is just plasma carved there again

He said he missed it
The roar I made
Staring into the cavernous seaweed choked hole strewn with aftermath
Selene is rust and cracked hissing out red in the sky
She is cracked plates in the sink
***** gravel in my shoe
In the ever expanding potentially something space
potential never came to port

The gulls crying over the copper crusted seabed
Like kettles hissing from seawater all boiled off
The Dry reefs
Are Aching

I wished he would take my hand
Ease me back
To the shore
Look at me like my love is the most ordinary magic
Like it’s all that keeps us breathing
Like I am inviting him into my arms
He could be knee deep in me
I would hold him
She told me to never rely on a man
And look where she is now
Broken in the sky
aching

So I am my mothers “I told you so” layer cake
Cut me with a fork and enjoy the satisfaction of the bite
I am hidden away in the ***** of barely started story
He wavers as if I am a door and not the sea
The Child of Selene
not Gradual building
Not Tidal
Not Timely
Drinking in only as much as you step in
He says he can’t know
With his half finished polisci degree
If this
is
A thing
He missed it
The roar of my leaving
He is in limbo always
aching

I pour myself into a bath
Soaking
Doing what humans say
Will ease my
Aching

I tend a temple of false gods
Believing a glimpse inside my heart would turn a wandering cat tame
Foolishly holding onto false beliefs, singing hymns of all those happy wishes granted
I have never met someone who couldn’t walk away from me
Red dust blowing on perfumed breeze

I thought love was my name tattooed on their lips
Spilled in immortality across their work
Love is lost in a desert, aching in their words for the cooling touch of my love
flint in your eyes strikes a fire in me
I am the one that burns
Romance is cold, far
Echoing across a chasm of loneliness that I dug with my own bleeding hands
writing my longing across my work

I wanted you to be Eve and I the fruit of knowledge
Know me with your mouth and find me irresistible
Whisper into me with your teeth all the things you are afraid to say to anyone else
All the things you are afraid to do with anyone else
my skin a place for you to rest

But you went out of the garden without knowing me
Leaving me rotting on the vine

I remember the heresy of the false gods  
how fervently I prayed
Romance is such an empty glass
Desire not even half full
I want to fill your life so expansively
Like an unfurling nebula
So much potential
That you cannot breathe