I swear on all the gods
that don’t exist: whatever
is haunting you will always
breathe down the back
of your neck. You will never
outrun yourself. Go travel
this entire ****** and ******
up world. You'll come back
a ghost.

Before Mom got sick, Sundays always taught
me to Be still and know that I am God. I tried
to look my best when asking the sanctuary’s
chandeliers for forgiveness. Six feet deep
and seven months later, I got my first job
changing oil and on Sundays I would work
double shifts to pay for my sins, and I’d roll
them up and smoke them and they made me
Be still, and know that I was God.

Now I’m a ghost wallowing throughout this city’s
shell, haunting streets and raising hell—I’m broke
like a wallet and nervous like first days, but I am
adapting to the side effects of motion sickness,
the way my stomach overthrows my mind and liberates
my insides—defying gravity, flowing upstream
through my esophagus, they bellow out like cigarette
smoke or the sounds of my vocal chords. And slowly
I’m forgiving myself for being still for all the things
that don’t exist: I’ve found a strange heaven
in staying ceaseless.

I am a warped vinyl’s distorted resonance,
a dedicated outlier, forever unapologetic,
agoraphobic, and inarticulate with little interest
in this downtown hotel lobby overcrowded with
fiction-faced drunks, and their slurred semantics.
You will never really know me because I don’t
know how to explain it, as we’re ascending
in the elevator, as your finger’s falling down
my spine. I said nevermind.

The hotel floors are vertebrae in a backbone
composition where your finger is an elevator
and I am a building, of many hallways, rooms,
and floors but nevermind: we will not be this
way forever as we were never before,
temporary like each story’s stoic attention
to the elevator doors and I don’t know why
you’re listening but finally it’s floor forty seven
where two ladders take us to confront
this ****** up empty city. Of the streets
and the deaf buildings they keep,
the in-betweens where I walk: a phantom-face
bleach body forever wandering

I get mad at my hands a lot. I remember
how they would struggle to contort
themselves and my shoe strings and how
for so long I was embarrassed by the
laziness of my fingers. They would never
tie double knots right—always strangling
my feet—took forever to finally prevent the
slow untying loops of lace into loosely
tangled treble clefs

or my ampersands: their shapes like ******-up
figure-eights, always ending up in between
important words. And for what it’s worth, it’s a
conjunction that looks weak and rushed, which
makes it easier to look at because I don’t love
you. Even in Times New Roman it feels this way,
it looks the same: just as tired, as it tries to
keep us tied together by taking empty space
between our names—I hope you mind the gap
when I’m gone; it’s my hands I blame.
You never did anything wrong.