strands of hair, half-remembered
the sun has shrunk to bone.

light across a bedroom floor
spread brittle, held, lost.

this world deserves nothing
acre lit.

nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing.

Some nights it
is alarmingly
imperceptible:
an exoskeleton ascends
on iron rivets and steel;
unseen scaffolding tapers
to a steady pulsing point
of phosphorescence—
a mechanical heart
circulating red light
into leaden clouds.

Some nights the air thickens
with cordite, grief, and snow.

Tonight with winter here
we can see the tower’s
beacon blinking through
a tangled scrim of trees
half a mile across town,
and yet even with our
bodies squeezed together
like radio dials in the dark
we are unable to tune it in—
the signal that would calibrate
our estranged transistor hearts.

He's not a man of many graces,
fewer teeth than tongues
but he won't say much with his lips.

He's at his strongest when you push,
but never from a kiss.
See,
he's stubborn in every way that doesn't matter,
in every principle that has no lesson.

I've bent the spines of fragile men
to see how far they'll go
before they break,
before they'll form into a crest
of his back that I can't dig from my head.
I've watched them fall in love with me
because I thought that maybe
one of them would empty me,
but they didn't.

He is an ill-mannered world,
the kind that breads creation.
A manifestation of passion and fear.
With eyes that dug twelve foot tunnels in my veins
and went there to die.

A man of simple needs,
plesantaries and shaky knees.
But he doesn't want to see you quiver,
*he only wants to know it.