I’ve spent the whole of this evening
drinking bug repellant and
wrapping my brain in gauze

because small shifts of her feet are registered on the richter scale
and my chest
is crowded with stalactites.

there are paintings inside of me;
a maudlin girl with porcelain skin unfolding onto velvet,
bleeding into other men.

her crying gave me tinnitus,
now my ears leak silver-

their canals are comprised of melted
nickels forgotten  
in the center console of her car.

come winter I’ll cast a ring,
though I’m terrified of snow.

It’s always sedatives during hangovers,
until every blink feels like pouring dust on a patch of dry grass in the sun-
bleached white.

I am offset;

an old railcar piled with pages,
shunted forward a few
inches every Saturday or so.

my mouth fell off on crooked tracks,
now I speak through rust-

corrosion carries all the stories never told,

a burnt patina
imploring passengers to pore through
its contents
till their hands are herringboned with paper-cuts.

it always ends in locked jaws-
with tetanus in their blood.

when I awaken
I extend my finger
towards a panel of dancing light-

did you know that its veins were torn from a mountain?

a whole hierarchy of angels
living inside the earth
were turned to transistors

so that my letters
could glow in your hands.

when I learned this
I began sleeping beside a stream,

in the places where I could watch
wires dance-

beneath wooden pillars and their flimsy black arms
whispering secrets in permanent embrace.

every night I would dream  
to the forward noise
of churning water;

of fluid drifting through the air unseen
or pouring from life long past-

terraforming
for the maintenance of symmetry.

I asked
the second hand of a clock

what exactly makes it tick,

it told me that I’m blind
every fifty milliseconds;

oh,
I swear I’ve spent whole days
in between the twitch of an eye.

I asked the psychologist the same,
it yielded nothing-

the paper proposed that pupils
scale with difficulty,

mine swallow nebulae
during the easiest of tasks.

I asked away,
but realized in a breath

that those apertures are
little girls and little boys

bundling desire
as twigs to use for tinder.

I heard on the news
that the Apinae are disappearing,

“the what?”

“the drones darling, bumblebees.”

“and?”

“you should decorate your hair with daffodils; the yellow offsets the onyx.”

you thought
I looked at symbols too often

I thought
you were thirsty for color

“you have never mentioned dying
bees before this moment.”

“oh, up until today,
I never knew that they danced.”

unfurl,
for this body can be unworldly frenzy.

sweet child
barebacked in the glimmering half-light;

adorn your skin

with shell and bone,
with coiled vines and fig leaves-
you love equally
gardens and caves.

before the clouds became
contemporaries,
your arms were flesh

athirst and empty;
lurching
towards sugary fruit.

I am unborn,
clawing through clutter
and encouraging my salivary
glands to push moisture
through the will of hypotensive
medication.  

Laying next to my betters,
begging to die of a heart attack
while I *******.

It’s nothing like falling asleep next to someone.

I am nothing
but half-breaths lent as largesse to
a hypothetical togetherness
hurriedly collected in the night
and burnt into reels of film.

I ascend ladders,
my favorite has its base resting
in my spine,
I climb it up,
always up-

only to find lacerations  
in the fibers comprising my thigh,
and a lovely image of
a love that is not.