And if I could only slow down
Part my fragile self-conscious lips
Let these frail wisps of language escape their cage

Instead of shooting them like cannons
Into the walls that everyone puts up
It does no good to destroy you

And so I look out a window
At stalks of untrimmed weeds blowing
And sun guiding their unhurried gait

I don't have the courage to touch a woman
(I lay down a line of a white powder)

I don't have the power to maintain silence
(face to table, inward vacuum of powder)

I want to feel her hair
(I lay back my head and close my eyes)

I fantasize about commanding her attention
(I swallow the pill)

I need to hear your secrets
(drink after drink after drink)

Need you to read my words and love me
(swallowed whole by emptiness)

Need to be needed
(need to forget this world)

Yeah these words flow through me now

Now they fall off my fingers like shedding skin

Get caught in my throat and fall back down through my neck

When I try to say them

So they ferment in my soul

This is the sound

Of a heart being ground down into a fine dust

Lined up on a mirror as you gaze into your own eyes

And shot through your blood with a stainless hundred dollar bill

Ears pop as the pressure builds above your head

It's quiet down here

silence surrounds you as you willingly
sink
into the darkening depths

small flashes of light you see down below
glints of teeth and scales
a flicker of a gargantuan tail

It's darker than anything else

above you light refracts into the water
the light has no eyes
it cannot see
and soon you will not see either

holding off the final breath

but you know it's inevitable

dare you?

breathe
sink
dark

You carefully placed the shackles over my heart

And held your posture in a careless poise

As if the galaxies around your head

And the golden clouds spinning from your lips

Were as natural and as merely there

As the pollen falling off trees in the summer

Before you died during the winter

Just like the trees

That you used to play in the roots of as a child,

The moss around you transferring its spirit into you

Unknowingly

Growing into a fragile disenchantment

A fragile discord

A fragment of an untrue memory

Worth dying for

So you chased the golden threads

That ran though your experience of life

Like some starving prospector

Searching always for the dream that would make you

Whole

But deep down you knew that your dreams

Were woven into an ethereal tapestry

Crumbling

Paint chipping off a cracked concrete wall

Withering to a powdered dust

Oh you knew

You knew

That I wished I could have understood

What our bodies together would have felt like

Maybe like the bark of my childhood trees

Divulging secrets into my ears

That no one would ever understand

But me