i was beneath the bed
listening to the in-out
thinking about how we
all take the air differently
when josh came with the cold
outside and drunkenly mistook
me for Christina, found his unusual
place and passed out  in stiff shadows,
smelling faintly of fireball cinnamon whisky--

plenty of moments reserved for sinking
or abandoning ship, receding into that quiet
place, hungry for a will and a way

when matthias finds me ransacking the
kitchen cabinets, i am rattling the underground
Seattle with a clorox induced vengeance
because i only seem to find peace in leaving
an old place clean, running my fingers through
jello shots that have disintegrated sometime in
the 3 am when for a few minutes we must
have all been asleep.

( all            the             while              Adele   )
hums in the background--a languid Hello
solemnly stitching itself into my memory
something to later hold dear, some fragment
of an adolescence that was realized on this
night, when I was removed from the place
beneath the bed, stolen from the house
dreaming that I was found inside
the mouths of strangers that
passed alongside Boylston
with their misshapen bodies
coiled in streamers and
various liquors

so when i return at 7 am
still wide awake and waiting
I examine my ******* in the
foggy mirror of the bathroom
before taking what I would
endearingly refer to as the
dirtiest shower off my life---
how could such a thing
be so? I'm curious myself.

I've spent two weeks cleaning an old place.

he says he's an open
book but

why bother with
a heartbeat I can
hardly hear

there's a dale as you're entering
El Paso County where my fingers
feel heavy and my arms take on a
distant memory, a spirit dug into
the highway that radiates the way
the land does in Mailuu-Suu or Sellafield
because in this valley the rocks are coquelicot
and the trees gasp from snowy outcrops
in a tender, pleading kind of way--
so much so that I want to reach out
and thread through their weeds--a
demand so visceral that I feel the
pine brush on my palms and the
bark scrape skin from my forearms
but
then

the valley opens with it's shaved hills
and pulls back in the rear view mirrors
where its memories don't reach.

no one tells you what the strain is like
when you know you're waiting but the
when is questionable and the who is for certain
when you want to stay frozen because without
a leader you know not where the ice cracks
but just how to crack it--with your heavy feet
and sand-laden spirit, with a body drained
down to the dregs, so hopeless and inconsequential
an existence in the flesh.

I mean to say that nobody tells you what the strain
is like--to be plagued by the notion that your choices
put a spin on people, a timer on chances, a could-he-be
would-he-be play in a hundred acts in which girl
sleeps with his sweater while simultaneously
managing to hate herself because she can't actually
see herself with him, hugs him with a hand slid
meticulously over his chest as he turns away
scared to death of the inner monologues that
begin with "I will hurt you..." and end with

maybe
if i just
s  t  a  y
a w a y

i'm starting to get bad again
and i'm scared --
-- not to get bad,
but because
i want to.