people ask me if my brain has started rewriting itself
If my consciousness expanded to take up the space left behind in these two months of rapid decline
Maybe in the week my eye has refused to read street signs and text messages

I am asked If I start hearing people’s locations as my sight slips further out of my reach
as if this is a neotech drama about self awareness and I am Neo
I just need to wake up, take a pill and I will harness the Matrix

more aware of my lost ness of my smallness
Of how I am I insignificant and absorbed into the collective strangeness of a crowd

It is not a different kind of light or of seeing but a falling darkness and sensing things in the night, when bats are flying low and recklessly close. When I feel the current swell around me as the unknown let’s me escape in previously grandfathered ignorance.

Tonight I am not ignorant. I am looking at a blank and dismal map. It is not filled in in the slightest.
I am rust and berry pulsing within a thick cracked skin in a sea of unbeing, only aware of where I touch the raw, colorless, and endless universe
Intensely attenuated to my body curled in fetal position
against the thickest nothing I have ever encountered.

like a slumbering geode
Filled with colorful secrets
Poised to bloom
I wait
But rocks sleep forever

i trace the fire escape diagram
i hear a nurse say my exam room in a voice that is a hushed yell

and then i shape shifted
i became the door
i heard the results
of the urinalysis
the medical staff murmur
the door that was not just a door because it was also the other side
it was the end of ever feeling normal

and then i shapeshifted
i became the insulin vial
into shaking milky contents before drawing up
an addiction to survival
of marks into fat instead of veins
of hoarding life in the glass walls
of my benevolent cage

and then i shapeshifted
i became the doctor
who saw a 13 year old girl shaking
withdrawal symptoms from high glucose
promising false hopes and faith healing
promising a cure soon
promising god's love
that would never arrive

and then i shapeshifted
i became the faulty pancreas
under attack from a faulty immune system
giving it my very last push of life
i really thought i was doing the right thing
i didn't know i could **** the girl

and then i shapeshifted
i became the floor cleaner
acrid and masking the smell of the previous occupant
pressing against the girls face, etching myself into her skin
becoming the fear in her trembling hand

and then i shapeshifted
i became my mother holding her daughter
slapping her cheek
rubbing glucose gel into her gums
willing her to live

and then i shapeshifted
and i became a thin, pale girl
who just wanted to leave the hospital
but after a diagnosis the hospital never leaves you
you return for every checkup or emergency or surgery
and you never know when the end will be but
you know will die in a hospital

i just wanted to be the that girl
who did not count out 13 and half grapes like all the other kids would never even think about
i just wanted to be the ******* the other side of the door
who didn't know the diagnosis
who knew the way out
tracing an escape by heart

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.

I shave the side of my head like a person prepping for surgery.
Work says nothing because they cannot regulate hair length 
I cannot put a finger on what is different inside of me but something is buzzing, very low, a tinny whine I cannot place or diagnose, a faintness in my lungs

When I dress in the morning, I rattle a little like a snare drum left snapped in place, too close to a speaker hisssssses
My mother asks me what is wrong with you?
I can honestly answer that I don't know.

I dream about coming out, again, to my mother
I imagine the set of her mouth like the a warped paperback book. I’ve read this book before, when I told her about the first woman I fell in love with. When I told her that my partner used they/them pronouns and she used whatever she wanted.

Coming out and telling someone you were assigned someone you cannot be, I don’t want to read that chapter.
She will see this as losing her daughter.
And I wish she would surprise me.

I expose the shaved side of my head to the sky, begging anyone to dissect me 
and whisper into my bloodied ear all the answers that lie inside of me.
I don't want to tell my mother the results.

i think we both wanted to believe that it would get better
i think we both lied to ourselves,
that I would ever really want to have children
that the ****** space between my legs
would ever look like anything but disappointment to you
lie 1 after my career got started for real,
i could think about adopting
lie 2 after your commitment was over,
you would move somewhere for both of us

so much education and learning
4 college degrees between us
you build things to go into space and guide missions to galaxies
what was wrong that we could not learn how
to build one ******* simple bridge
i feel like so many times I googled it and you seemed surprised
Like open source relationship advice
Had never occurred to you

White papers stained with black numbers for *** therapists liter the bed
White pads stained with my blood for increasing numbers of days in the litter bin
Maybe if we stop looking at it, it will go away
Maybe if we stop talking about it, it will clear up

If ignored like a pimple, it will clear
Instead of doing the right thing, we sit through
two years of arguing in a counselor’s office
I’m not sad that we "tried to work things out"
i’m sad that i tried really hard
and you left me
with my scars still stinging.

Something lives deep in our bones, 
dark matter only observable in the forming and crashing of galaxies,
solar storms only threatening to debilitate at certain times
Eclipsing moon throwing an inky curving blight across moments
You are afraid that my shadows will take me violently from you
kicking and fighting into the vast nothing that waits under a fragile skin
Coldness seeping into every cell, ships without fuel, the lights going dark in the sky
And I have been making my peace with this every day
Storing up every last dimming of lights and ceremony of routine like an astronaut’s last day planetside

imprinting your skin on my mine until I don’t have my own fingerprints any more
Trying to fit all of you in my arms, but how can anything so wonderful be fit in something so flimsy?

The shadow that mocks me most is not mine
I see it in the corner of the things you 
say only when you think no one is watching
4 shots of tequila in
It is defeatism
It is I Will Never Be Good 
So Why Even Try
I Will Never Say It Right So 
Why Even Try
It is thinking of train tracks and freeways and loaded guns as escape routes
And it scares me just as much as hypoglycemic brain death and diabetes scares you.
And I wonder -- Trying to reach you but only getting static interference - will this solar storm pass?
If I embark on a rescue mission will my gravity send you spiraling out of control or bring you back home?

My shadow can wear a monitor
can have a leash

The vastness of space does not scare me because I can carry my space station home with me, spacewalk with you tethered
As long as I have you, I can feel safe from my shadow.


Holding on in desperation
I cannot save you.
You will slip through my arms like sand

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

they do not fit into my hand
or under my bed
no
the ghost of them looms over my house like a cloud
i know the feel of them in the night
they breath on me, fingers in my hair when the wind blows
and each day they whisper my name
and i don't know why they still make me sad
they pull me under
catching me in a riptide

but here
pouring my tears into the ocean
i can finally feel empty
washing my wounds in the brine stings me with regret
but the sea salt spray has taken their smell from me
the wind drowns out their touch
i rise from the foam, a new kind of Venus
now the screaming gulls echo in my ears
finally alone
but i cannot stay here because
the shine on the crest of the waves
is the highlight on their blue eyes
and the sand is too rough
like their hands
my lips chapped from the sea breeze

after years, now i no longer dream of them
the scars have healed over with new skin
their faces forgotten to me
their shape i cannot trace by memory
their names a song i no longer know
not anymore

you ask me how i got over them
i didn't get over it
i just drowned it out until
it was no longer able
to drown me

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.

I do not fall under two choices
You know Luna, earth’s moon waxing and waning between full and new
I am the moon of a world you have never seen
You will try to name me
Shake hands with my dust as you walk across my surface
And with every step you drown out my true name
I whisper it still into my own body,
rocking on my axis
Soren, Soren, Soren

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

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

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.

She wipes my taste from her lips and says “you can’t be queer at work.
It’s not professional.“

She doesn’t think that it is okay to wear your whole self to work if it is not straight passing
talking about straightness is reasonable
But bring your gayness to work day never comes

It is a storm that I hear every season, but this time I am caught out in it without shelter, hail pelted on soft petals barely open.

She doesn’t look queer
she is a woman
she looks like Helen who was loved by all,
tan and toned
from looking out over the ocean and lifting her beauty up on slight shoulders

If it was unprofessional to be straight
or to use pronouns at all,
I would understand.
If we only used each other’s names
and I was asking for more
or special dispensation
I would understand

she says she doesn’t understand
why I need to announce on glittered skin and lips that I so proud of who I am
Why I need to brag with rainbow eyes and clothes
My Blooming to her is rising higher than I deserve

But I am not Icarus with waxy wings plummeting plumes and
mans mistake of highest hubris  
I am asking for you to see me as I am
Not what you have assumed that I was

When I painted her with rainbows and kissed her in the dark
she saw every inch of me
intimacy that only the moonlight knows
She accepted me then, fleeting as that night was

Then she scrubbed my kiss away before anyone that mattered could see
Stripped off my borrowed rainbows
Dressed  in unassuming pastels
Seated comfortable in a chevrolet status quo
she drove home to her Barbie dream house
Kissed her fiancé Ken
He tightened his arm around her the next time I saw them, pulling rank
I am only for the moonlight

Demeter welcomes her with open arms
In this world they have never parted.
She is Persephone who did not eat the seeds and queerness is Hades, she only vacations here

I plunged my teeth into that’ fruit before I knew what queer was, I ****** down enough seeds to keep me Cerberus
Walking among the rest of the world wanting to belong, but standing out like I have three heads.

He held hands and when he ripped away
Felt it unfair that he only
came away with his half
Complained when both my eyes
Were a mirror too small
to see his whole self inside
Shoving his fingers in the cracks
of my tear ducts trying to open my gaze
see more of himself
Complaining that my tears were wet
My pain was hard to hear
Disappointed that this was the affect
That I was not blessed
That I did not thank him for his time
That my song was not his side of the story

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

You are delight
I want you to remember this moment
if I ever lose the touch of your fingertips
exchanging so many times I love you
I will protect the feeling as we press our hearts together,
beings made not of binary but of ether
Drinking nectar of blooming stars
Spinning our laughs into the night

You are safety
We bandaged each other's wounds when attacked
Living in bodies like ours is dangerous, is war
We trade our battle stories and scars
Taking our presence back from woolen pockets,
unraveling our rage and winding into skeins
Knitting row by row a full soft community,
Inviting us to rest

You are life
You make me feel planted,
stretched toward the next time we will speak
as a sunflower turns, face kissed by the sun
You are a gift that cannot be held, given, owned
too much in the way that confounds men
but always just right
told that you should, you should, you should
shredding them and lining your nest
working, you sing

You are the moon
I set my time by our visits, our calls, our messages
like you in all the universe are brave
breaking the atmosphere of the earth
to join in the celestial dance
you humbly, kindly exist in harmony
you are comfortable in stillness
yet your beauty attracts any light and makes it yours
dancing as you glow

You are thoughtful
Absorbing knowledge like paper drinking ink
You write like the world is transparent to you
glass for you to see more clearly
you hold my gaze like a seer
yet you bend to earth to work
dirt on your hands
You are not glass
Remember that you are this powerful
Remember that you should be seen
Your stories are legends

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