there are bullets from told centuries
in my bones but this year has
ensnared them with flowers
so that i have crumbled in prickle
and thorn; i am too feeble for
the battlefield now, i have lost
my luster, have been scrubbed down to
sullied brass and **** without
purpose.

i want to bleed
the rose petals out of me
and make myself
a target again.

my fingers are scarred with the snap
of war's bitter teeth; they have
sunken in and dragged, sunken in
and dragged me out until i have
touched my heart's heels to every
battlefield-- made me a canopy to
encompass every blood-embezzled
decade. i have made myself a
hideous phantasm of Vietnam,
a tattered, frayed mountain-scape of
blue-belled America, a depthless
sea in which my brothers boiled.
i still hear bombs when i walk
sometimes, in the dripping black
of the nighttime sky i see the way the
mortars ripple and burn. but i have
never found another stretched-thin
soldier, with artillery rounds cradled
in their chests like i. i have been stumbling
and crying across the earth's crust,
screaming,
DRAFT ME
FIND ME
DRAFT ME--
finally the draft plucked me up and
brought me to you.
in you i have found the brother i lost
at sea, the lover boy of 19th century,
and the one i held close to my chest in
Vietnam. let me touch my hand to
yours and remember; i know i
will feel all our old words course through me,
all our ****** teeth and
crying eyes and
all the times we touched
brought back to
this moment.

he was set like daggers
in the teeth of the world but
those shaking eyes have lost
their luster because you are
gone. you have skinned him and
left him to be grape vines and dried
leaves. he is not hte alcohol, we can
no longer get drunk off of him. you
are. and you took him and molded
him into a chalice to fill with your
wine. your wine that tastes stale
without the billowing swell of his
sweetly fermented words.
but he has lost the stars, someone
****** them out of his marrow; he
smirks now with less of the divine
glow of eden and more that
of a carcass, the dead body of the last
words you said to him. do not apologize.
he is far gone.
you can tell by the way
his fingers tremble and the way
the wit is empty
the blood is empty
the soul is empty.
come back.

can you take my
shotgun shells and press
them into your ears because
i don't think i can stomach them
by myself,
he says, whispers to me
feebly while he plops the
heat of skeleton weapons
into my hands.
i did what he asked,
but he never told me his name.
and now i am sitting here
with gunfire symphonies and no
identity to put to the trembling
fingers that composed them. did
he **** or was he killed?
did he love his friend more
than himself and is that why
he held his ****** hands
in his ****** lap and
cried, "death love me" ?
i am shaking and small--
so was he.
i do not know much else of him
but that his face was sunshine
leather and his eyes were purple
in the haze of ****** summer
and more than anything
he was so terrified;
he did not
want to eat
his shotgun shells
alone.

do you realize that
i love you
do you understand that
i love you
have you heard that
i love you
what you’re doing makes
my gaze feel like
cement when you walk away
no god—why are you waking away
they always
walk away
and i am just an empty hallway
they use to get to their
destination; i am not
nor have i ever been
the room they are going to;
i am no place of residence.
i am something you pass
through to go
somewhere else.

i am overwhelmed;
bursting through plaster cracks
and jagged leftovers of stained
glass, my mouth full of wet fire
and heavy things and my limbs
shaking and shaking and shaking.
i have been devoured by love
for you—its teeth have never been
honed this sharp before they have
never snagged so deep but i think
they do now because love wants to
hold on this time, tear the protective
barrier of flesh and bullet-ridden hesco
skin off of my bones. it’s okay, i would
love to be eaten: i want the bites to crawl
up and down my fingertips and tiptoe
in zig-zags up my spine until all i can do
is sing and cry and listen to the
insatiable beating of my ink-swathed
heart. i have only ever loved literature
until these moments but now i have
made you into a book and will
tattoo your words at the crook
of my elbow and in the soft
craters of my chest;
god, i will read you for eternity.

every word is
futility stuck in the
keyboards like thick,
obsidian oil and the typewriter
clicks and it clicks and it
clicks its asinine teeth;
mocking the slow sad
lilt of my prose that is
supposed to eat up
the pages, like smoke in your
throat and hey i can’t breathe
kind of eating, gorged— but
instead they just sit and quietly
play in the grass;
they are idle. they
do not swallow
the world like i
want them too they
just sit.