there's a paradise in the way you say my name or she says my name or he says my name syllables crashing like head on car collision or train wheels wrestling with the tracks one time i brought back a starfish from the ocean hiding it in my sweater pocket it soaked all the way onto my pants into the upholstery of my father's old car and everyone pretended they didn't see maybe it wasn't even there, maybe i wasn't there sometimes ghosts would follow me i would end up breathing on the glass and leaving impressions as proof of existing, of understanding what it meant to live with the living
getting home, unearthing my discovery in the bathtub but there was only a thud, an ugly crash on the resin the fiberglass making the death inhabitable i wanted you so much you turned to stone a hard shell of what i found so beautiful i could cry but there wasn't even a yell ignore me and ill love you forever i picked you up, cradled on both my palms but the keepsake was in the lesson a memento of solitary moments waiting shrivel up
my father found me or maybe it was my mother or maybe it was nobody and i picked myself up silent into the backyard where i dug until my fingers hurt, until my hands knew the brittleness of rhythm i might have never stopped until i reached some kind of closure or maybe magma, a molten crust of hell i had missed before my jeans dirt-stained and my face red from scratching bugs that weren't really there maybe we met at the wrong time, maybe there's never a right time for anything you reach certain points and then head back in the other direction you bleed until it's time to reach for the band-aids in the medicine cabinet and call it healing maybe i'll never know some things never figure out questions that still tap on my windowsill demanding to be answered or asked in the first place and i think i can fit comfortably in that, in this