*** by ***, my elbows fold into myself, peering through my small intestine until they articulate the undulating passage of my ileum.
My knees crumple, embedding themselves absolutely into my chest until they flatten my heart against the walls of its own cavity as it beats faster and faster into the shrinking labyrinth of capillaries, distorted by the pressing loss of space.
My mouth is filled with the gentle tang of warm spinal fluid as sinew and muscle catch in my teeth.
Indiscriminate limbs clamor out of the carnivorous spit of stomach acid into the empty spaces left by my long deserted lungs; until all of myself is cowering behind the stoic battalion of my ribs, unrelentingly upholding an assemblence of structures against the assailing inward pull of joints and fear.
Soon they crack, and the sudden consolidation of mass breaks a hole in the floor and the parasitic being of self spills through ceiling and insulation to rest in the basement.

You are           ...sleeping.
And I am awake.
Smoking cigarettes on porch
and the curb
and underneath the leaves of this foreign place as familiar as our bed.

(Our bed ?

Perhaps. )

As you sleep,
Breathing heavily, soundly,
contorted into dissociation
Blankets wound around your body
        -That I don't dare touch;
I breathe so slowly, so so

S
  L
    O
      W
         L
           Y

[ S
T
A
R
I
N
G
    at the wall ]

And speak to myself in the voice no one will ever hear
with the intensity of red
and the pace of INDIGO
INDIGO of the wall outside your flat
INDIGO of the sloshing acid of my stomach
INDIGO of the synapses pulsing electricity past my neurons to the unreceptive brain matter that lies beneath your skull  

Indigo indigo indigo

Ind(i•go)
(In)•digo
I•{ndigo}

(Witching hour approaches)

And I approach nothing
                      Nothing nothing nothing
Approaches me
Invades me
And I ask.               {Please}
But my eyes evade me, speaking distance
Across the span of OUR bed

¿Ours?

With the dawn virga of
pink light in the window,
The heat of your hands tenderly apologizes

And in the morning
You kiss me
Exhaling dreary carbon dioxide into my mouth
Stale alcohol meandering past our teeth,
Settling in the air between our tongues.

What is it you misunderstand?
Your beauty, or my softness
that seeps through the gratitude we call
us
And fills the ever leaking stream of consciousness
I deem,
incorrectly,
you.
Take my hand
Fair Dreamer of warmth and honey,
Let me hold your sticky pollinated eyes
in the palm of my days
And caress the electricty
of your thoughts in motion.
Sit with me a while
in the quiet being of
almost sleep,
And eat these sweet raspberries
I plucked from the tree outside your window,
As we osculate into the
liminal tenderness of
your sheets.

Let fractals grow beneath my fingertips so I can feel them spiral through my veins

as salt water percolates through suppurating wounds.

Let me lie supine in the open air of dysphoric intimacy

So the cold creeps through the subterranean skin of my chest

Let my blood flush my cheeks and spread unrelentingly

*excoriating the flesh of my exposed body supplicating itself before the sky.

I cannot love thee as I ought,
  For love reflects the thing beloved;
  My words are only words, and moved
Upon the topmost froth of thought.

'Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,'
  The Spirit of true love replied;
  'Thou canst not move me from thy side,
Nor human frailty do me wrong.

'What keeps a spirit wholly true
  To that ideal which he bears?
  What record? not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:

'So fret not, like an idle girl,
  That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.
  Abide: thy wealth is gather'd in,
When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl.'

I don’t like when Jane leaves the baby’s door open,
But we’re away now. This house is heavy with strangers' history,
It's peeking out of the shaded paths and gardens swollen
With verdure; hinting at the tantalizing possibility of mystery
And restorative power of air, after all, that’s why we’re here

John doesn't believe in fantastic daydreams
(Imagination is a delusion perpetuated by fools)
John says we are sleeping in the nursery for its sunbeams
But there are bars on the windows like metal rules
And it is papered in a grotesque sin of undulating chaos

It inhabits me, twirling dreadful arabesques behind my eyes
    Momentarily.
Many yellowed
                Almost, not quite, dead
It grows within me
  Dis-
        -tending my belly
No no no

This air will do me good.

I move as a somnambulist through the morning
Succumbing to sleep in the afternoon
       (Moonlight brings the amber insomnia of the walls
                    Bends my eyes from sleep)
But it is nothing. Merely my own laziness. A hysterical tendency.
Really.
shhh..

SULFUR
   Color
SULFUR
   Scent
In my (inhale) lungs and
(Shoulder to the wall, follow) on my clothes
Proptotic eyes leering from crooked necks
Carious fingers reaching into-

Fireworks on the forth of July and me,
with the docile vengeance of a failed mother
Writing with the frantic purpose of a bumblebee,
…If a bumblebee was splitting
in two

    two layers of the wall
         One mutating concentric fungal prison
         One captive-her?
(Her that creeps, her that inhabits [me] the wall)

I am tired.
    But I must find the origin. Pattern. Meaning.
           I know it holds someone.some memory
Hidden

My shoulder is covered in yellow pigment
My knees hurt
(faded band following the baseboard
pressure of a shoulder in orbit)

            She hides, but she is mine
She who-I who shake the wallpaper-
SHE shakes the wallpaper in moonlight
I who shake the wallpaper
I who T
E
     A
         R
with teeth and claws
my prison from the wall
I who creep beneath the paper
           (crept behind the paper)
    FREE
           OF-
John
oh,

J
O
H
N

You're in my way.

We strolled through converging pathways spilling with synchronized chaos, finding our own space amidst the rumpus of the crowds on a small hill overlooking an endearing muddle of humanity. The grass was wet with evening dew and we were colored with the aureate light of dusk, watching everything swim by with novel delight. The city erupted before us, vibrant, apathetic, and amoral and we swelled with its magnitude. Round and enchanted, we rolled down the hill and fell into the peculiar happenings encapsulated in the windows.
We stood before a man with no eyes and worms coming out of his fingertips in a room with no floor. He smiled at us, carious teeth bending into slight parabolas under the pressure of its sweetness. We excused ourselves quickly, escaping into a opaline kaleidoscope that had opened up before us. I could taste all the lives we tumbled past as a mix of bitter almonds and grapefruit with the occasional shock of decomposing fish heads.
We squeezed our bodies into the melody of a madrigal sung by a girl with four heads and sonorous hands to find ourselves in the rafters of an old cathedral. Below us contorted souls filed into wooden confessionals screaming sins of their fathers into the ear of a deaf priest who gave copacetic blessings in the form of an orange pill bottle. Distended and bruised, we fell from the ceiling into the baptismal font. Bioluminescent algal blooms effloresce above our heads and resplendent stingrays whisked by, casting soft, amorphous shadows across our cheeks. Lulled by the etherial tenderness of the liminal world, we fell asleep with your hand on my neck and my fingers tangled in your seaweed hair.
We awoke to the sound of falling peaches and splitting skin. I pulled a small fish out from behind your ear and inhaled the brine of your tongue before stepping into the open window beneath your pinkie finger. A man in a suit who was really a box jellyfish greeted me in the center of a opulent office building that had no purpose. I politely declined to shake his hand and instead lost myself in the map of the city unfurled beneath the wall of glass in front of me. I pulled a small seashell out of my pocket and threw it. Everything shattered.
I felt you next to me, falling through space and low-lying clouds to find ourselves in the present.
We are saturated colors of mustard, earthen green, and midnight blue sprawled on sloping grass without hesitation. Buoyant and expectant, we meander through song and chatter to find ourselves bright and shining on a warm green bench talking in improvised harmony. Our skin is a new composition of window light, yellow and breathing. A synthesis of memories pool and flush our cheeks with affection and we inhale the world. Flags pirouette and fall, a refracted constellation glimmers on glass, and you taste like honey and rich smoke. The moon is ebullient, so full and round that in a gasp I pluck it from the sky and place it in your shirt pocket. We’re effervescent, with giggling fingertips on a euphoric investigation into novelty of human sensation. Somnolent and gentle, we fall asleep with the memory of our water soaked bodies burgeoning under softened hands.