A secret in my palm
and a secret in my mouth,
and the two are not the same.

God says He’s sorry,
and I say I’m sorry too.
The truth is not the same as the lie,
but they have the same taste,
the same weight,
so I swallow them both.

I ask God if He remembers
the day He knit me together,
with fear and wonder,
all thoughts and thorns.

He nods His head, and I nod mine,
and we both agree
that He should have been more careful.
I say I'm sorry again,
and this time I mean it more.

A plea in my fist and a plea in my throat,
and the two are not the same.
God says He knows my heart like
I know His mercy, and I feel bad,
I think He might be as lonely as I am.

God tells me a new song is coming,
and I tell Him hurry, I want to sing.
We both know that wilderness
is a state of mind, a state of grace,
and I let my mind wander.

You can play
with the tension
and not get caught,
but you can never
break it;

not when nerves
are taut telephone lines
purring with electricity;
thick enough to chew.
The cracks are deep
enough to bury a secret,
swallow each perforated promise,
and each broken beacon.

I can feel your pulse
racing against mine.
I can't tell whose heart is beating
and whose is beat.
We are two sticks of dynamite
in the same trophy tin:
sparks of breath singeing skin,
we hold each other up
until we hold
each other down.

The rules of war change
with your mood,
the laws of physics
are putty in your hands,
and the tides of time
are your own
collapsing conspiracy-
a house of cards you reshuffle
and repossess as the candle burns
a circle of wax on the table.

I can’t decide if you want to devour me
or decimate me—
adore my halo
or annihilate my hope,
love me with your whole heart
or wreck mine with your whole weight.
And you can’t decide either,
can you?

The light is unkind,
the land unforgiving,
and you are all
my favorite lies;
the canvas of my
incomplete portrait,
the crossed out pages
of my abandoned poems.

You can play with your edge
or throw me off it.
Either way, I'll be yours to keep
or yours to conquer.
I won’t tell you how to ruin me,
or beg you to spare me
from your rabid reign—
I’m not that kind of country.
I’m an open border;
a shattered compass,
spinning wildly.

But I will say:
the ruins
are all that’s left when
the empire falls,
all that’s real when the
games are done,
all that’s preserved
when the tension eases
and the maps are redrawn,
again and again.

I'll send a postcard
to your grave.

It’s hard to untangle a supernova
from the hope
that it might explode…

We’re all a little bit in love with it;
our demure undoing and unmade sense,
our limp-wristed magic,
our dour dashes.

We all know some things need to be left unsaid,
but what if the last word is yours and you say it?
What if it becomes the last true thing,
even if it’s not?

When the sky stretches open like a yawn,
and the ground cracks like a grin,
we’re all a little bit thrilled.
Constellations burn like cognac,
satellites swirl like smoke.

The senseless will sharpen the shimmer
of sad-star-ellipsis, then spin them into a wreckage
of exclamation points and full stops, falling
from their own weight and into ours.

We’ll put our spines to the ground like fossils,
tremble with wide eyes and open hands,
and then listen for your last word:

Sanctified and starry-eyed,
I thought I could have bad thoughts
and still sit dauntless
and debrided
on my mighty throne of miseries.

I thought I could pocket poison
and still polish my poems
with punch-drunk hands,
still bleed revere into the wide-open
unbearable,
still beg for big words to break
the uncanny uncertain,
still dance with a demon in a moth-eaten skirt,
still giggle like a new tango for your ballroom
brainwaves and barricades.

I thought my gaze could pin
your fancy and fury to my wrist,
let the rapture steal through the window,
burn down your pretense,
your pathological provocations,
and find us intertwined and divine.

Lovelorn and luridly-lit,
I thought I could spin you
to a dizzying depth of sirens and stars,
diffuse the bomb in your mouth
and be the ballast
for your throbbing, cracking heart,
your writhing wilderness,
your wretched wreckage.

I thought I could buck up-
brush my hair,
and rose-blush my way through
your strange dark and
your winding labyrinth;
the coiling curse
of your unquiet heart.

Jilted and jagged-pricked to the quick:
I thought I could be the saint of your history,
the angel of your archives,
the verses you could not flee,
the name you could not outrun.

I thought the city I built could outlast
your spite, I let you burn bridges
while I slept under them,
collect your sharpest flares,
your longest shadows,
and postmarked daggers,
then drown them in my last-resort lullaby.

The flames I stoked could do the dying for you,
and the sky I swore to keep
would not fall for you like I have.
I thought I could find the key to your riddle
and wear it like a necklace,
we lose our thread,
then find it as matching knots on our wrists.
It’s really not that hard to be
the answer to your own question,
you just have to know what to ask.

This is my first-ever life. I’ve never been anybody's,
I’ve only ever been any body.
I’m not brave because I’ve never had to be;
I’ve never had to call my own bluff, or learn
the rules; I’ve been coasting by bad beats
and dumb-luck, and the boys always
fall until I flush, tilt until they fold,
love me until they don’t.
I pocket the chips anyway.
My clumsy hands get antsy;
always dropping hints and pennies,
never dropping hands that drop pilots,
barely dropping hands that drop bombs,
and my fermented dreams;
my sweet turns so acidic, I can't see
the color of an aura over the bacteria and bubbles.
I go to sleep with yeast on my fingers
and get drunk on my dreams.
I’m a bad poet and an okay bird;
I spend my midnights pecking on the keyboard
like a sparrow at its reflection, tapping out
a list of things that might be.
I have this thing where I try to write my way
into myself, but the vocabulary makes me lie;
the syntax makes me slink,
I use semicolons wrong,
and always too many commas,
but if you’ve ever seen the inside of my mouth,
you know that I’m doing the best I can.
My first-ever life is shaping up to be
an entire sentence so run-on
and run-down that it
almost doesn't matter if I get to the end;
inmates don’t get to choose where
they serve, even if it is my first-ever life.

I’ve thought about what absolution will feel like in the dark,
how forgiveness will sound in my hands,
the smell of clemency in the morning,
and where the sun sits in the palm of a man
who hasn’t let himself get used to anything.

I’ve thought about the resound of effusive, earnest prayers
when I finally mean them,
what the poem will look like when it escapes its cage,
and how the night will unfurl its sparks then
shatter stars along the promenade.

I’ve thought about what would happen if I stepped on his face
and kept going– if I’d hear any bone-snap.
I’ve imagined how fun it’d be to drown his gaze in its own
reflection, to be the echo he chokes on.
In my night-struck existence, I’d giggle while he stumbled around,
a charred-orange wreck, a muted-barb affect.

I’d plug his mouth with a sharp-edged, holy silence so
that the next girl stands a chance; so she won’t be
gouged into a ghost, all violent and vanquished,
a lacerated light who still has a soul to save.

If I cut his lungs with a poem, would it be a mercy killing?
Like a priest praying for his own death,
would I be breaking the sacrament?
I’m still consuming a body; a different kind of lamb.

Could I slice into his side and crawl back into his rib,
hold the pulpit, perform my own liturgy, and seize
the forgiveness that wasn’t offered?
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned-
Deliver me, Father, my light has dimmed.

‘I just started feeling like I was hurting you.’
Your narrative, not fine but okay.
If you want it then ask for it, don’t show off for me.
Cringe and grin, loaded questions, uneven answers:
Your ******* between my ears,
my rot at the center of your chest.

Your mind’s a weapon of my destruction,
my heart’s an insurgent on your tongue,
war crimes and an urge to confess sins
I’ve yet to commit but pray to.

Your conquest, my damnation,
my crown, your thorns.
The best laid plans of mice and wrens,
and all the flesh that must be shed-
******* it up again.

Diametric wonder like impenetrable alchemy,
'I just wanted to use the word penetrate.'
like I didn't know that; like I'm not flushed,
tripping and dripping at 'alchemy.'

A single shadow for two ghouls,
born from a short play and two ****** fools.
One grave, two lives,
one coin, two sides-
‘my head, your tail,’
poetic every second of every day.
Ease into this, okay? Sometimes it works out.

You’re not that horrible, you know what I mean.
The taste of something like a target ****** upon me.
You told me you love damaged girls,
and I’m unparalleled, all broken and brilliant,
all twirling, starting fires,
all strange and wonderful, relentless and ravishing;
already here, all ready here.

You told me I’ve never really played along,
but I played merry hell with our ransoms and struck more nerves than we thought I could reach.
I have plenty of your secrets,
and you’re the milk-silk viscera
weaving through so many of my poems.

Whiplash, so it comes to nothing.
Whiplash, and hardly a tool for self-harm.
How dare I turn your hollow eyes into a lens that looks back to me?
How many lives do I owe your blue and burning?
Whiplash, a quick, heart-drop minute, a long, wretched second.

‘I did not see that coming,’
listing tautologies, I have so many reasons
to believe you but I don’t.
‘The right thing is to walk away.
Not string you along, try to use you, ******* around,
all the things I want to do.’
and what are you actually looking for?
You imagine you’ll die before you find out.
It doesn’t have to be so hard.

I still think there’s hope under all the blood and terror,
the unholy mess and the violent red,
your commitment to torment and a stubborn that’s just stubborn.
I still think there’s a place where we can lay our weapons
in the grass, sign a treaty in the dirt, and call it a covenant.
I know there’s a place where our hands are clean
and the poetry isn’t tangled in throats and fists,
where the light is warm, the sparks are softer than you think,
and whiplash is just another way of seeing stars.