a fever trembles through me
soft madness, river of joy
to see you, half-asleep
like origami
all folded up and delicate,
beautiful bones in sharp lines
my paper-cut
heart of the sun.

i’ve seen the shapes
and lines of your fear
mismatched animal in a glass jar
the world rattles you but you don’t
wail; your wide moon eyes
paint more than this:
you are so much,
you are everything.

the nest of your arms thaws me;
you crack my air wide open when
you speak
rearrange the needles in my chest,
cotton voice lined in mirror shards --

        ‘survival comes in many forms.’

show me, then
allow me to know
your lonely, thicket-veiled garden
the orchard you fed your blood and
hid your hunger in, until
you picked me.

you gnawed at the peaches but
spat out the pits
like they were a secret you couldn’t
keep.
explain to me, how you kept
that slow shivering spring
all to yourself;
that graceful richness
that gentle strength
they couldn’t carve
right out of you.

less than
these things all clotted me
but you still freely flow
jagged child, true heart of mine --
unto yourself endlessly.
you’re not peaceful but
you are kind. your kind
is my kind and i
am yours.

(my lungs want your lungs
like my lips want your nape
like my ribs need your ribs
like my hands need your face.
your wrists and
tongue
and sorrow
find their twins
in mine.

you drench my body
in swollen love --
your body, swollen, drenched --
you grant me
the seas of your skin
blushing sweetness, teeth-baring
grin
spilling clouds of wit against my
neck when you move --

i am offering you my bare
forever.)

sink into me, remarkable
prince of starlight --
for when you fight or
when you rust
my cup is full.

our true natural state
is death:
life is an anomaly.
we are meant to be
corpses,
yet we flail about in this
glitch
of existence.

like a rock is drawn to its place
on the ground
a certain gravity pulls us
towards death,
towards the end of that
mistaken spark;
all as it should be.

the earth swallows us
gently strips our bones
because we are food,
we’ve always been nothing
but food.

it’s no wonder our
decaying matter causes it
no indigestion:
we belong to the worm,
to the inanimate,
to the world’s gut.

our innards, our marrow knows
that all this frenzy to preserve
our fleeting inertia
is futile;
still we rage, rage against
our place in the family of things.

i want you to
crush my skull like a watermelon
gently step on it — till it explodes
and leaves a wet pink mess,
until the dark seeds in my brain
come spilling out into the concrete,
red watery juice seeping into the cracks.

oh, what a sweet
release of pressure, what
a satisfying sound
it makes when the ripening fruit of my fears comes
undone by your hand.

don’t tell me to open up, to join in;
don’t tell me i’m no fun, killjoy, wet
blanket, spoilsport —

maybe instead consider for a second
(roll the thought from palm to palm,
measure its weight)
that the things that make your body
sing and vibrate with joy and
warm lightning

are the same things that twist the
restless branches of my veins into
knots and drown my brain in
frigid paranoia;
make an earthquake in the bones
of my hands and birth live spiders
in my gut, billions, creeping
upwards and all over
my insides,
blocking my windpipe.

the higher my age climbs
the more i feel like that little kid again
staring into the mirror, wearing their
parents’ clothes;
a first attempt at performance,
roleplay.

those two numbers seem oversized,
daunting and ill-fitting
too grown for my
tiny body, tiny heart, tiny brain,
tiny ability, tiny understanding,
tiny sense of self.

i cannot fill the sleeves of my father’s jacket
i cannot stand confidently in my mother’s heels
i’ve barely transcended toddling,
and my hollow translucent arms are too short to
reach the shelves of Adulthood.

(i’m not a daughter or a son
i’m a child.)

(tripping gracefully over her gory visage,
        she bashfully, covertly unveils her
        untruthful veracity,
        invisible in all things seen)

her phantom form surrounds me and
slides her arm between my lips, into my mouth
                                                    finger - after - finger;
i slowly swallow her whole
(she leaves me no other choice)

the quick fog forming in my eyes
threatens to spill
(i think it does)
i choke, my teeth grazing her entangled marble limbs.

my once untarnished tower of a neck
now a blemished python, bruised by suffocation
finger-painting, hand-print impressionism in
                    russian red and prussian blue and palatinate purple

my angry lungs drink her in
the space between my thoughts and veins becomes considerably smaller.


(i am crowded,
        i am
                 o
                    ver
                          whelmed.)


e­xhausted, i gasp for words
but those too have left me a while ago,
when her impact carved that permanent indent on my chest:
i can never rest.

if i could control your Heart
(which i can't; other's, yes; yours, no)
i'd ask you, not force you, to give me what i want

for my greatest pleasure would come from
you simply blindly handing me
        everything
                  you hold dear

of course, i'd want you to suffer as you do
(i'd want you to scream for no one to hear:
                          a silent, pathetic thing, crawling out of your
                          straining throat)
                                             struggle, as you do,

while having no choice.
                                                 [ a war between heart and mind! ]

but, after that initial brawl
kneeling, bent as a nail hit upon
by a hammer at the wrongest angle
the palms of your Large Hands would face the sky

                  and you'd deliver.