I watched the fire burn silently and slowly,
I watched it spread throughout the hills.
I watched the sky turn dark with ash as the vows you made had crashed.
I watched you burn as the fire came around.
I watched you burn.
I watched you burn.


**Burn.

The women drink the tapwater-
even the infants are drunk.

Regulated heavy-petting, severed metal jukeboxes of the new platoon. Orations in the streets, on their knees; women hanging from street lamps, their shoestrings dismantled, clothing sifted through for every karat of worth, then the shoes stuffed on- bare naked bodies and tangerine blossoms came through the Eastern air. One of them coughed something, not in English. Each of them riddled through with decade-old grins, as if from a childhood game of cops and bandits.

Every part of my trust in her body, a knot made of plastic in a reel of film strung from her shoulders. A gunshot emptied her stomach, its bang echoed cerise colored paint.

tonight I faced my biggest fear
of a dog charging at me
and not letting it get hit by a car.
Unlike how you grabbed my ankles
and threw me head first into
a semi-truck and watching as
I combusted into dust and gray feathers on our 5th anniversary.
Maybe you were hoping to see a plethora of colors.
Just because I tended to inhale paint 
and spew it onto a canvas means
nothing. 
Y'know, it's awfully rude to build
a house on someone's spinal cord
after only biting their lip.
The blood didn't fill my mouth,
so I guess it didn't mean anything.
So until it does, I'll wait until summer
thaws the hearts of dead bodies in
every concrete cemetery 
so I can hear the earths core
sing my favorite song,
you hitting your coffee cup on
our ceiling like You've Had Enough.
You used to play it with your pulse
so loud the walls would shake
and start to erode at each crevice
your song made.
That poor house never stood a chance 
with the way our internal screams
messed with the plumbing.
But that's why you're hammering
nails into my vertabrae, 
and that's why you keep my coat 
on the tip of your tongue.
So I'll have a place to call home
and you'll always remember what my 
lips tasted like.
Vanilla and saltwater.
The taste of past lovers and sweet futures you always said.
But now your house is gone
burnt down by the fire that is my soul
after you three gasoline into my
intestines to get rid of the old letters
my mind sent through my veins.
never say you loved the hot waters of my skin.
you changed the temperature every time you got the chance.
which begs the question
how does one turn the dial
on a heart encaged like a bird?

witnesses came again,
reminding the words are there,
black and white, the finger writ,

he said, in the beginning it was so.

then having spake moved on, with
language unbeknown. how did

they let it happen, the flood, how
did the house surrender. a holy

place. a place of conversation, stuff
of the age, no empire building here.

there was scarambled egg, and a cabinet
pudding waiting.

sbm.