and you’ve tried your hardest to bite a hole out of my heart,
and my legs still tremble when i stand too long,
and my arms still falter when i love too long,
but now it’s time to patch the ache, with your
bloodstained teeth. but now it’s time to salve
my hands with your eyes

I’ve tried again and again
All these heavy words, inflated with
Their own majesty and the intricacies in their eyes.
I’ve tried to make you out of paper that flew too easily.
Since then, I’ve realised
You are neither stardust, nor demon, and
You have no darkness strident in your veins, no galaxies expanding in your breath and filling the spaces between your words
You, after all, are only human.
I need not look up at the skies endlessly to catch a glimpse
Of your fleeting hands flicker.
You were never there.

Wet lips flush with sorrow
Bruise pink and blood seeps
Drips and pools into sterile
Collarbones
Hands are cold, winter breeze
Ghosting over snow flesh
Smothering dark, preserved
Bone marrow and tree branches
Shaking in a fine tremor an
Endless earthquake rolling
Its hips into the molten core
Of another being in pieces
Of thigh and heart and blown
Brain all over the highways
Hazy with heat and potential
For violence and passion
So similar we dig our fingertips
Into calves unsure whether
We are beyond simple life
Beyond stardust and nebulae
Or already buried beneath
Cherry tear whisky and loam
Too heavy and human to
Feel the press of flesh joy
In places we flush emotion
And sing me to short endless
Sleep and crumpled hair under
Your arms and cider breath
Temple slick with promise
Gone by in a future decomposing
In a nest of vulture and flies
Somewhere in the desert of
Times playground pieces of
Ocean filling our lungs until
We can only gasp for more
And take me take me take me
Take me take this scrap of
Fabric skin I've forgotten
Take me take these ripped
Shreds of conformity and life
Give me myself.

I dance tonight under the traitor moon,
All high and glorious, pale hearted and cold and
She turns hungry mouth to my bud wings,
Child and imperfect and inhales;
My toes outdo saplings and push
Through loam air, and yet, and yet
Only my breath drifts to join such a
Coward moon. And again she *****,
Locks her vivid mouth, more real and
Wanting than the frost climbing and settling
Into my bones, more real than your
Sunset love, she presses open mouthed her
Perfect, red lips to mine and the void
On the other side of her curved, sea light
Body turns its wide gaze to my bird-soul
Fluttering weak, soft eyed, and yearns,
Until it tumbles, wingless and blind to it.
My human body slumps to chill earth,
Full to choking of dark soil and grave haunt,
And it whispers to the distant, single moon;
I am, I am, I am.

A wisp of sound scatters through the thick air,
In tatters, it climbs itself into my head and nestles,
A bird soul evicted of its body, blind and screaming,
Its skin torn red and raw and too alive;
My arms turn useless, as it stretches out and out
And finds my legs, large and dumb and too much,
But it will do, it will do as it continues to stretch and
Stretch in search of feathers and dust. There is a pause
At my hair; it runs with the wind and briefly its hands
Outstretch to its hair and contemplates a familiar lustre,
Black and shining and soft, but no strain of limbs come
And in frustration, pulls like plant vines.
It continues to search and search, but there is no freedom
Written in my back, no wings outstretched to the wild skies.
And no matter how much it beat its sharp little beak,
There was no flight to be found.

I’m in love with this sort of forgetfulness,
This deliberate flashing of eyes and toothy lies,
This beautiful, iridescent wonderland that we got lost in,
This forever we created in a mirror;
It’s cloying and honey thick on my tongue, and
your mouth tastes like all the truths that we buried.
Show me that Cheshire cat smile again, boy,
let’s pretend we aren’t going mad.
Let the lights swirl before your eyes.

Summer nights, hazy days, our eyes reflected in the light of a thousand dying fireflies-
The chapped shine of your parted lips; breath still cool even in the blaze of your oceanic eyes,
The slow, consuming heat that made us reach for each other, careful and feverish, with our limbs too aware of mortality, too aware of the dry leaves inked into our skins,
In that summer, we gave up our running, gave up our languid nights wishing, aching for oceans and stardust and lay heavy in the graves of sand and seaweed instead.
In that unchanging summer, we stopped trying to drown ourselves by accident and let ourselves be suffocated instead.