I love the carnival
I don’t love butterflies or photographs
But I love the wings and faces
When they’re caught in the lights of the rusted rides

I love the way the light dances on your face
And makes amber to hold your pupils
I love the way you blur when we go in circles
The way your nectarine laugh tangs over the children’s
When the wind makes your hair a fury
And your teeth are naked in the glow

I love the ferris wheel
Over the river at night
The fake dahlias hanging from the booth tresses
The lilac smell of warm nightfall
And the cold fence wires passing over my fingers
While four eyes are hitched to the stars

I love the immortality
Like a kitten I was too afraid to touch
Delicate as a paper ornament
When I would twitch around 9:30
At the thought of my feet on the carpet
And my raspberry joints turning sour again
You overhearing the mortal in me
Became my midnight sigher

Ambrosia, I think
Is made of wet cotton candy
And the games we won

It’s made of teacups
The peer in the dark
And the way you looked into adult eyes
Older than they will ever be
And more innocent than their children
Your sneakers covered in dust
And your head lolling against the car window
With our hands touching like wind chimes
In our candlelit drive by the ocean
Your lips would open ever so slightly
When you started to fall asleep
As though you had something more to say

Man,
You carry me higher than any big drop
With your arms at your side
And when I go to the carnival at night
I still look up at the stars

Sleep is for the body
But sleep on an infected ear is a temptation of the mind
To know the pain so obscured from passers-by
But preoccupied in the mind of the infected, so craving rest
There thrives the vicious throbbing
A pulse radiating through the cartilage
From the outer lobes to the frontal lobe
The heartbeat has turned against me
Every vessel scrawling suicides on the wall
More than antibiotics can coax
…
This is the kind of heartbreak that makes you lose faith in medicine
The eustachian balloon blown up and holding
Swollen like the lung that held the loves unsaid
To burst is to admit defeat, to pick up the pieces too great a cost
To drain is salvation I cannot afford myself
Some swirling impression hangs over
This masterpiece keeps turning sinister in vertigo
Even when the feet are still
It’s a sick dog made of wine and high
Refusing sleep for fear of never waking
…
I wrap myself in a fur I forget is still wet
Self portraits catch my eye to walk past the drunken mirror
To frighten oneself at how same it looks to crater from the pain
Than to smile at the ignorant friend
How the spine has not bent itself in two
And the eyes have not fogged in the face
But the ear can scream out
…
I walk the same house in the same clothes you held me in
And throb to remember and to hear
The white feather of your voice
Plucked from the baby bird you saved
So innocent and new, a kiss to the vernal earth
Airy like fog on the mountain
An orphaned fox playing in the midday
That’s the perfume that drips from my lobes
And falls to the backs of my hands
When I remember the way you’d wake
And say my name after a long sleep

I wish I could fall in love with the boy I see in the mornings
The one who sits in the back of the class
With his fingers resting on his desk
I know his face so much better than the faces I’ve lost over
It is soft and unweathered
Yet to be traded in sinister motives and the mortal conscious
The way he breathes is not overly considered
And it’s easier to convince someone who has the time to listen
…
He is taller than me
With a strong jaw to wave when we talk
A mighty gesture to the glory of the weather
Or politics, some godly small-talk
My face fits between it and his collarbone
The heartbeat is easier to reach
A simplicity that becomes luxury in silence
…
His toes ***** in a way I could want for a son
They tap when he sings his ballads
In a voice good enough
He can sit through a symphony without falling asleep
And he nods to acknowledge the history I tell him
With a smile
He smiles at me
In a way that could mean something if I camp under it long enough
…
Perchance we stamp our wedding vows
On a monument to convenience
To legalize curling up in each other’s breathing place
And tolerate the stench of desperation