Your lips tasted like smoke
From the buildings you watched burn
While standing dead center

Our bodies are practiced in the art of collapsing

A collapse to make harder
Make stronger

There is this company called life gem
That can turn your ashes into diamonds

We have diamond potential

Welcome to the church of falling apart
The church constructed from the things tempers make
Built from all the rubble collected from every collapse

It’s where we pray
In tears
Red eye gritted teeth frustration
Pray like a seizure sometimes
How I buckle at the backbone
Bulging out my belly
To show you
There’s still beauty inside

If you’ll forgive me
You can take it

10 years is a long time to love someone
Especially for it all to stop in an instant

I know we both prayed for the love to come back
And if these walls could talk they’d be suicidal for some paint thinner
Wanting to forget as badly as we do

And I am sorry seven ways til Sunday
Just seven days til Sunday
Seven chances not to **** up
Before I have to beg forgiveness again

I wanna pick up the pieces
Like broken glass
And make a disco ball
So I can dance small miracles
In a body designed to break

You know
If I had a typewriter big enough to run myself through
I rewrite the rough drafts god never finished
I’d put the psalms back in my voice box
I’d pray calmly

Despite what you might think
There are still ways to be broken and saved

This church isn’t firewood yet

So let’s sing a savage hallelujah
Know that forgiveness is the only way not to be bitter

Then we can collapse heavily into this bed we’ve made

Know we can always remake it in the morning

Welcome to the church of falling apart
With you at the top
Bangin’ away in the bell tower
Finding ways to drown out the cries
Like morphine

Just above your head
There is a slow fire working its way down
So everyone can exit safely
If they want to

We can make angels in the ashes
Like we do in the snow
And then we can rebuild

Lisa looks like she’s stood a little too close
To Dante’s Fireplace
A *** soaked ham left in the dirt
Small crust spots where the skin broke

She’s stopped wearing her dentures
Looks like her face is sinking inside of itself

I was napping
Dreaming about a rock on a hill
That overlooks my city
Was dreaming about what the gun said to the mouth
About how the bullet wanted a kiss

Found her lying in a window
Like a fish whose bowl has just shattered
A bowl that has been ***** for too long

It’s a mixed blessing
The glass bubble burst
The blood

I keep my window shut
The smell of the *** I dumped into the earth
Creeps in
Juicy apple pie smoke fingertips calling

Lisa’s kids
They don’t understand the anger
Don’t feel the neglect until it’s too late

I patch up her face
As she begs
Just don’t call the police
Don’t call anybody
I’m okay
She passes out
On a ***** couch
The kids crowd their mattresses
So they can sleep near her

I think about something I read once
About a company called LifeGem
And how for a small fee
They can turn your ashes into diamonds
Enough for a necklace
Or two bracelets
Several sets of earrings

Even when you’re worthless
You’re worth something

I buy dinner before work
Something fatty and saltier than their tears

She would always say things like
YOLO
You only live once
And then have a drink
Or hang up on a police officer
Or shut a door

YODO
You only die once too
I know how I want to be remembered

She looked at me and said
I think you could be someone
Who I would want to cry at my funeral
Because you would have loved me forever
By then

Even in my nightmares
You have no clothes
And I wake cold-sweat
And my ***** is confused

It would be cliché for me to tell you about
The doves
Beating beneath my heart-heavy breastplate
Only most days I feel like a sad piñata
And I want you to beat the heaven out of me

I know what Satan saw
In his decent
And it was worth the trouble

It wasn’t you
(Conceited)
He didn’t see you

Just the passion
The things I want to do to you

Like a lynching
After being dragged for miles from a horse
By the throat
And called a suicide
Only because I didn’t try to stop them from taking me

I want to love you like I should have known better

I want to catch your breath like a harmonica
With my hand over your mouth
A bent note all heave
Slip between my fingers

Let’s be wrong together
Like a nun in a church
Playing I Want Your *** on me
As if I were a ****** pipe *****
Tuned to the key of hallelujah
With a distortion pedal set to laughter

She shook like a love letter
Dropped from a balcony
I didn’t offer my jacket
Just my arms
So much rusty bear traps
Their damp hinges closing is a lonely song

I want to leave here feeling like a shotgun shell
Thrown to the floor hot
And used for killing something
Like the time between now
And your next misfire

Even if we’re just friends by then
She says
I would want you to be there crying
I couldn’t imagine you
*anywhere else

Before walking through the doorway
Made of trash bags
A woman checked our ID’s

We passed the booth with the feathers and the ball-gags
Passed the woman selling *** toys
Just a white awning with plastic chairs

We sat and watched a man dressed in leather
He was the kind of expert who understood his passion
But for him there was no teaching it

Beer saturated my white shirt
As I sweated it out
I could feel the alcohol in my lungs
I breathed slower as if it would hide the sensation

He explained to us puppy play
The dynamics

He had his own puppy with him
A man so good at making wet eyes
So good at seeming lost

He barked and wagged an invisible tail
Chewed on rope
Probably he thought about burying his bone
What his wife might be making for dinner
Wondered if I had recognized him as a regular
At my work

While taking questions the leather man said
It takes time to discover the puppy inside

It makes me think of how
In order to view ourselves as anything
We need a filter

I want you to **** me
With a ****** full of yes

I told them
If I were a puppy
I would be very stupid
But great to cuddle

We can admit these things about ourselves
While in character

If I tell you
I am pretending to be anything
I can still find ways to pretend to be me

It is like an electric chair
Disguised as a lazy boy
It will not hold you for long
Your skin does not fit proper

It makes me think of my father
The Clown
Who bent me into shape
With his balloon animal breath
Only he had asthma
The empty static

My inner puppy
Is a half deflated balloon poodle
Ends pulled tight like amputee sausage link limbs

Looking lost and lonely isn’t hard
What’s hard about it is
Looking like that was your intention

In character
Some invisible narrator
I can admit anything

Stop what you’re doing
Cut to
My old math teacher

The one who I saw at gay pride a few nights ago
Wearing neon rainbow fairy wings
And an open, white, feathered vest
And ***** shorts
And glitter
So much glitter

How even at a place where you are supposed to be wholly accepted
You can still find yourself comin’ up lonely

He stands to the side
Head down
Messing with the batteries for his glowing wand
As if once his whole ensemble is complete
He’ll be okay

I try not to watch
No one wants to be seen while changing the batteries
In their confidence

Cut to the next day
Where my friend Monica asks me to write a poem
About how god is a pointillist

We are both drunk
It his hot
Even though I don’t think I can do it
I say ok

Cut to the actual poem

Space is ******’ huge y’all
And from the distance of godliness
We form a complete picture
Like bleeding dots
Waiting to be human

How we probably smell as good as a perfume shop
From the distance of subtlety
And how the hate in our cacophony
Becomes a human white noise
How it all blends beautifully

How if we were created in god’s image
Then after 2000 years
In the cold blackness of space
He rests his head on his hands sleepily
And can only daydream about us
Because his sight and hearing have failed him

And as a collective
We represent an emotional spectrum
As big as his ego
And as large as the hole in his heart

All this has ever been about
Is finding ways not to feel so lonely

Cut to the molecules making me human
Cut to the bits of space dust that made us
The iron in our blood was once star parts

Step into this with every ounce of yourself
So I can hold you like water

Cut to the days that I get so ******* scared
That I have to think about friends just to sleep at night

Go ahead
Take a look at all my bits of broken
Stare holes into me
I promise
All my insecurities are placed where they’re supposed to be
So are yours

So are you

Cut to the grass under our feet
Being stomped flat by the dancing

Step into this
with every ounce of yourself
So I can hold you like water

So from the distance
Where bleeding dots blend
Into uniform color
Our chaos becomes trivial

I want you to know
it always has been

Because from whatever distance
We see each other from
Right here is where you belong

If it wasn’t
You wouldn’t be

My bad choices were borne of good intentions

I just wanted him to hurt a little

So much like a lost boy
I explained to him how things are
And how they are going to be

And he is gone now

He is skinny like water cascading
Down a xylophone ribcage

He is a clumsy song
A constant struggle for a high note

“It’s the thought that counts,” he says

Says, “The cream takes the pain away in my feet
Don’t worry I am making myself better.”

So many days I wish I had his dumb hope
Believed that people are only bad in movies
That everything works itself out

I have the wool
And is eyes
But lack his energy
There are holes he has made
Through bitter curiosity

It comes honest
His head throw-back mouth-agape cackle

“I am making myself better. It doesn’t even hurt right now,” he says.

Only because I love him

I wish it did

Hurt

Just a little

It makes me think of the cloud
Human heart-shaped humble
Floating alone against an onyx horizon

We see it because of the lightning
It wants us to know of its presence
Through inner struggle

I imagine that is how the heart works
Lightning bolts from the top to the base
From the sides
The smallest thunder

Even little voices stop us in our tracks sometimes

On a porch in a cabin in the woods
Even when we get away
Some things never leave us

It smells like citronella
but still feels like bug bites
a certain kind of back-of-mind reminding

It tastes like laughter
and feels like deep breaths when I need this more than ever

Life suckerpunches you in the gut
And sometimes feels like killing yourself backwards
When you finally get that gasp
You realize how sweet your own breath actually is

It is so sweet
Like them

A perfect collection of breath forming smoke
from the cold
and the ****
and the cigarettes

It warms me
Fills me like a lone lighting cloud competing with the beauty of a horizon
with simple flashes of light and the quietest thunder

Hear me heartbreak and simple chatter

Makes me think of the boy with the hospital gown smile
and the hopeless optimism

My beautiful back-of-mind bug bite
when we both need this healing

Healing is a fire sometimes
That feels like at any moment
It will burn out
But the embers pulse a diligent glow
to bring this back to life

Bring me back to life you poorly polished diamonds
We will reflect your light and bend the beams an entire spectrum

Notice me and this quiet voice
The smallest thunder and flashes of light like living Morse code

The simplest message

And this feels so much like a bent harmonica inhale
A beautiful gasp
A collection of smoke made from ***** lung laughter that doesnʼt rain
Only begs you to join it like the voice of god in a thunder storm

He speaks Morse code lightning
If you look carefully the voice is always there

The answer is always

you

The answer is always

you