The coroner called to ask how I am but i told him I’m not

You had two pillows in the house that you used, one
in the bedroom and one in the living room and while
I washed the other one three times to get your smell
out, the other i have yet to touch because
you’re coming home soon.

The coroner called to ask how I am but I told him I was.

The flowers didn’t bloom this year until midway through
May and I remembered because you begged me
to buy them and now they stretch their arms out on the
window box outside my bedroom, respect for
punctuality lost in a similar way that mine was.
I cut them down before they could reach their full
height and I gathered the clippings in a bag, burning
them the way they burned you.

The coroner called to ask how I am but I told him I’m trying to be.

Your sister came over the other day and asked for your
collection of playing cards because she said it was yours
and hers, that she had found most of them for you on road
trips and holidays. I remembered the way
she looked at me the first time you introduced us
and I shuffled a deck last night and could hear your voice
counting as you dealt.
I gave them to her anyway and thought I was signing a deal with the Devil.

The coroner called to ask how I am and I told him I’m barely.

Your shoes sit footless and your pants sit legless and I sit
you-less and cross-legged in your closet all that day, trying to
remember how to breathe.

The coroner called to ask how I am and I told him I’m almost.

The magnet on the fridge is crooked because the strip on the
back fell apart when you ran into that towering
block of tundra while chasing your niece and it fell to the
floor with a sharp crack.
I repaired it last Saturday and set it straight.

dreams like this aren’t a dime a dozen
and maybe it’s just me but i have the sudden urge
to rip out that piggie bank my mother gave to me
when i was six years old and gut it
with every knife in my silverware drawer
or the hammer in her tool box,
whichever i manage to find first.
you taught me proper grammar and spelling
and while i’m pretty good at one, i still forget i before e
even though you spent a half an hour teaching the rhyme to me
when we were in fifth grade
and suddenly we’re getting spelling words like relief and believe
and achieve and even though i had to look up their spelling on dictionary.com,
five years later,
at least i’ve experienced them all,
at least i know all the blues of relief
and the reds of achieve
and every shade of yellow that colour in ‘belief’
like a stain glass window,
and i’m glad i know what inversion and parallelism are
because if i didn’t my poetry would sound like garbled half-english
when read aloud.
(as though it doesn’t already)
i’ve found that spelling errors are slightly easier to rectify
and god knows you gave me enough dictionaries as ******* christmas gifts.

all ideas are repeated until we have left seven entities
with their tentacles cut off but spices sprinkled on,
ready for consumption, and i’ve learned that innovation and originality
don’t come from new components,
they come from the new arrangement of old components,
so if i arranged the alphabet so u and i were together,
maybe we’d have a fairy tale or maybe it would be a horror story
or a crime thriller.
i’d dream up the ending because that’s my specialty
and you’ll read it like the loyal friend you are
despite my many, many, many, many spelling errors.

iridescence was never my forte
but baby, when i’m with you, i feel like
i can be any colour in the rainbow

i.
dusk doesn’t feel like an end to me.
gladly, we play hide and seek amongst monuments
made in retrospect, and the sun doesn’t make us
go home until it’s already past dead. we drop
hearts on the unsuspecting, play make-believe in the
style of world war ii documentaries your grandfather
watches on the history channel. winston
churchill played with fire the way we play with
matchsticks and death and dying make
cameos fit for better actors. your rocking horse isn’t
fast enough. nagasaki still stinks of radiation.

ii.
we breathe, virtueless, shoes untied and headaches no
tylenol can hope to amend. there is
money involved, as there usually is, and
bills are exchanged from hand to soulless
hand, stench of cannabis like perfume in the air.
sobriety is elusive–you, effusive–we toast to
ambiguity and *** between stoners and
sinners. The ****** of yesteryear haunt street
corners we use for battleground, though the
fights take flight on rusted wings within the confines of our
heads, vacancy signs flashing in our pupils.
you reek immortal.

iii.
colourlessness is inevitable, but you always liked
noir films. i play you on first base, set myself
against flesh still pink with love bites from december
chill, and your lips tell a better story than
anything in black and white. we consume–we are all that’s
left. we don’t speak english until sunrise and by then we’re
telepathic. i don’t need words to say i love you.

iv.
we part, gasping for breath without sound in
clothes that don’t yet fit us right, doggy paddling because
they don’t actually teach you how to
swim in high school PE. you’re a
cartographer, your hands are
maps, and i am left bereft, grasping at substance too
thick for breath. i stop breathing, then, and
you haven’t held my hand since.

Endlessly, relentlessly, you make
haste by unbroken parable, cry
incense incensed, censure me, call
names of the unjust, we’re unjust, there’s
unbroken like fish and bread in
multitudes, swing low and wide on
fingertips that have never known bare
skin the way I have known
yours, chariots lost on pharoah’s
feet and dying prodigals covering
little ground.

Calling him, you came like
waves on shore parting for
boat hulls, licking up
starboard side thirsty for
purpose, raising church in three
days making metaphor into
matter, I met you halfway, holding staff
still dripping crimson on toes that
hadn’t yet touched the sea.
We made miracles.

I’ve yet to find contentment among
tents pitched forty days
ago, dusted in sugar burning
tongues too used to manna, leaning
‘against winds that
whisper designs o'er mount Sinai,
whisper Pontius Pilate condemnation,
whisper platitudes Peter proclaimed
before **** crowed thrice.
Crucify us.
We don’t dare step down.
Raise us.
We’ve yet to sin.

the rainstick is home-made
from second grade when they tried to make us cultured
and the paper towel tube it is constructed of
is frayed at either mouth
and peeling along the sides.
the construction paper that closes it is fading
started fading some time ago from all those days
spent on your shelf
and when you held it in your hands
i remember the way you knuckles looked
like little brass doorknobs all smooth and polished

i remember your sand dune curves and how
my fingers used to be the Sahara desert wind
sliding along the grains and making small dips and dents
in your pliable softness
those same curves could stop wars and end world hunger
i was sure of it
and hardly a day went by when i neglected to tell you that

you once gave me a journal that was leather bound
with creamy pages whose grey lines begged to be set under
a fountain pen and even though you knew
that i only liked my work when i wrote
about you, on the inside cover you scribbled:
for the days when i am no longer beside you—
they will come. they will come

the only love song i have ever enjoyed is the
sound of april showers whose droplets
fall gently on the roof
like the landings of a million experienced parachuters
because it reminds me of the rain stick
which you left on my bookshelf
on your way out

your fingertips are coated with stardust
from the other day when you dipped into
the midnight skyscape as though
it were paint and I could smell it on you,
the faerie-light, confectionary sugar scent
of hazy dreams the color of moon-bathed water

i clasped your hands gingerly because
everyone knows that starstuff is sticky and steadfast
and you told me that the oceans don’t
follow the moon for the fun of it

i don’t remember much of what came after
because you had aligned your fingers so
precisely against mine that I could feel the remnants
of a thousand dying universes caught
in the creases of my thumbs

i soon learned that handsoap only applies
to the earthly, just like water doesn’t even
touch stains on the soul

my obscurity was of a different vein than yours
and while moonshine hasn’t lasted this long in ages
I’ll still drink every drop until my body glows
pulsating with every beat of my
accidental heart

hiding was easiest before you showed
me all the colours you created
before your dirigibles dribbled drowsily
across my accidental skies

you haven’t found me yet
not one single atom
our subatomic particles weren’t made for
contact in a world too close to reality
and while our breaths had yet to align

i’ll keep breathing
and every beat of my accidental heart
will serve as the countdown to collision,
the nuclear fusion to bring me out of this twilight
and into the definitive
if diminutive
light of night fall

pipe organs take deeper breaths than you.
collect.
i don’t weave you into forms you don’t know how to embody and you don’t breathe words into my lungs that my tongue cannot form.
avarice.
you think my arms not as they are but as you understand them, and you wish they were the same thing.
begin.
i’ll hold you into perdition, remission, partition,
and there isn’t a soul on this earth who can do it the way i can.
concede.
there is more to you than the times you didn’t die.
bygones beget brokenness, insects don’t lift a finger, and we don’t breathe the way you do.
trust doesn’t allow for transgressions.
resuscitate, alleviate.
dreamscapes drift fitfully and i didn’t think of anything first, not even you.
rewind.
you’re impossible, but i always loved when my mother wrote fairytales.