My burning hands caress your body's baby hair, *****.

I am drowning in you,
and I am suffocating in nicotine stains,
falling from balconies of acrimony that you pushed me off of.

My clipped wing feathers burn in bursts
of red, cyan, and lemon.

I crash down into you one last time
where my seething nails dig into your skin,
searing you right out of my ******* memory.

I've only got so much left
and no ones listens to me not screaming for what I want,
my mouth full of feathers and blood,
weakened to the state of living past the point of dying,
to the point of numbness
where I can cut this skin like construction paper,
stretch it over love you never had
and find something that can carry me forward
into somewhere I can finally rest.

Those words are now meaningless
compared to what you mean to me.
Where I thought that there was no way to feel deeper,
you prove me wrong.

I am ice
and you were the cool breeze
that keeps me from melting and evaporating away.

No four letter-word could ever measure against you.

I was eating cigarettes for breakfast;
now I subsist only on the health of you.

I was dreaming of the day
I was born,
strangling on an umbilical noose;
you have slid your pink life-giving cord into my navel.

I was writing my suicide note,
but you came and lit it aflame,
blew away the embers,
wrote a story with a happy ending.

I dangled, atrophied, off of an edge,
my chalk-outline superimposed over the gaping black.
Your hair, strands of raven steel,
snaked their way through my fingers,
held me long enough for you
to pull me back.

You held my hand,
guided the crayon it held.
Where I saw only a blank
page, you showed
where the lines were and created
a piece of art beyond
anything the world has ever seen.

You are my life-support system,

Holly,

and without you,
I wouldn't be writing this.

She stands in the truth,
a puddle of lysergic acid
that seeps into her bare soles,
as a tuning peg twists her gut.

The single page, crisp,
bends, hangs limp
where index and thumb tips
barely touch left and right edges.

Her blue eyes quickly sweep left and right, work
their way slowly from top to bottom, absorb his self-eulogy,
drain their color out and onto the page.

As each drop hits, ink blots change from explanation and apologies
to a Rorschach Test to which she will never have an answer.

Moisture leaves her body faster than she feels it will be replaced,
she is mummifying herself alive in Sokushinbutsu,
attempting to join the Xerces Blue letter-author
who flew away into extinction.

The walls around her now close, tight, stone;
her only contact with the outside world the string of her memory
attached to the bell of loss.  

The weight of the page
she holds destroys her.

They said your footprints
were still on the windowsill
when the authorities showed up

I wonder how long my hand prints will remain

as I lean out and see the last thing you ever saw
speed towards you
like that camera trick they use where the background speeds forward
but the person stands still

I feel you in my nose here
all that remains of you is
a scent of yellowed dime-store novel pages
and I can't help but agree
when scientists say that
our sense of smell is the one most closely tied
to our memories.

They always said you had an old soul

but I know better

You lived with the clarity of a newborn's eyes.

I can bore you with talk
of women and children,
but it is simple enough to say
human beings.

Human beings
run in gathering storms
of concrete dust;
run from misting
of meat.

Explosions are sudden fatal therapy
for human beings
suffering dissonance,
and there's nothing quite
the same as losing words.

All of these
human beings,
cut-off
quick
in Tourette syndrome
(****!)
Pu.nc-tu-a.tion.

Caught in the concrete cloud
darker than Krubera Cave,
lost out on a betrayed Silk Road,
as bloated blue bodies
wash up on Indonesian shores.

This city of centuries
built by human beings,
has now become
almost-five thousand corpses
who dangle their toes
out of shrapnel windows.

Pieces of me sweat
away in an instant of swaying black burqas,
rocking on knees at a cemetery.

I’m standing in Beirut -
nineteen-eighty two.
I watch towers fall.
There has to be
a way to make the world relate,
even if it takes
nineteen years.

I'm going out and get something.
I don't know what.
I don't care.
Whatever's out there, I'm going to get it.
Look in those shop windows at boxes
and boxes of Reeboks and Nikes
to make me fly through the air
like Michael Jordan
like Magic.
While I'm up there, I see Spike Lee.
Looks like he's flying too
straight through the glass
that separates me
from the virtual reality
I watch everyday on TV.
I know the difference between
what it is and what it isn't.
Just because I can't touch it
doesn't mean it isn't real.
All I have to do is smash the screen,
reach in and take what I want.
Break out of prison.
South Central *****'s newly risen
from the night of living dead,
but this time he lives,
he gets to give the zombies
a taste of their own medicine.
Open wide and let me in,
or else I'll set your world on fire,
but you pretend that you don't hear.
You haven't heard the word is coming down
like the hammer of the gun
of this black son, locked out of this big house,
while ***** looks out the window and sees only smoke.
***** doesn't see anything else,
not because he can't,
but because he won't.
He'd rather hear me talking about mo' money,
mo' honeys and gold chains
and see me carrying my favorite things
from looted stores
than admit that underneath my Raider's cap,
the aftermath is staring back
unblinking through the camera's lens,
courtesy of CNN,
my arms loaded with boxes of shoes
that I will sell at the swap meet
to make a few cents on the declining dollar.
And if I destroy myself
and my neighborhood
"ain't nobody's business, if I do,"
but the police are knocking hard
at my door
and before I can open it,
they break it down
and drag me in the yard.
They take me in to be processed and charged,
to await trial,
while Americans forget
the day the wealth finally trickled down
to the rest of us.

Everything in the mind of the shallow is vanished in the eyes of hollow halls. That we could not live to see the sunlight, that we lost ourselves in an empty truth.

We were always broken, and we were never cured.

Because we hurt ourselves, and because we never listened.
I was always here.

But it was not my home.
And forever as the rainbows,
and relenting as the ice.

I stood by this place.
A giant with the smallest eyes.

I remember the blood in the river, the water diluted.

I was no man, in my hours here.
The sunset held me,
in my crimson waves.

The love that you had set me back for days.
And the lord spoke through me,
as I pushed him away.

I dont remember when my eyes went black.
I dont remember the seconds in the ambulance.
I dont remember holding hands with golden girls who wanted to dance.

And the lights here beamed white,
in the golden arch of the pale bright moon.

You started fires, and the embers scattered,
and the coals got wet, and space was born.

But I didnt belong,
so I tried to leave.
And the lord spoke through me,
As I pushed him away.
-P.S.