Today I wrote a song about your teeth.
They are crooked and imperfect.
Just like this. Our hands. And these
songbirds are all liars. We haven’t learned.
Flesh memory is overrated. Last night
I felt the linen, and it whispered to me
nothing. Not even the shape of you
reminds me of happiness. What is the use
of these metaphors if they can’t
beautify you anymore. No longer as fierce
as the inferno I allowed you to become.
Drowning in bedclothes, trying to understand how streams of consciousness
are becoming bodies of water. Today
I wrote a song about your teeth. And I
read it aloud to the voiceless, and now
they know what love tastes like.

Touching you was like static electricty in a dark room,
a makeshift thunderstorm in your fingers,
you had more noise in you than a little heart could handle;
so you came bursting open:
screaming, hands punching the air and gasping
for sanity; they said if you hear God it's probably purgatory
what would they call it
when I hear the windclap of your hips a sonic boom
and the quiet of your eyes like blood rushing to my head
in an anechoic chamber;
would they call it madness or delusion
or a mix of a little bit of both; could be alcohol,
could be love
because when I lit a match
in your darkness,
it burned the whole house down.

Find coastlines along the edges of your body,
mark your territory
and invite gallant young men to try their hand
at crossing a huge wall made of crystal glass
and steel verses.

Let them be afraid of the tombstones gathered
at the gates; tremble at their own risk
because your heart can't handle an unsteady hand:
it's filled to the brim.
And as the tourney dies down,
as the men scratch the surface
and leave with pieces of your arms,
your eyelashes, your cheeks,
there will be one
who is there when the dust settles.

Allow him to love you,
in a most consuming way; let him
take your body a shrine and let him
call it his only home.

Finally,
break his heart,
and watch as the poetry
spills out of you like
an angry river, from a spear
he wishes he'd hit into your chest
not cupid's arrow instead.

Sleeplessness is a lonely kingdom.

I could promise myself discipline with the daylight,
but what if I told you that I lied under the moonlight?
Sinners never sleep,
sinners never sleep.

They lie awake and talk
with the wings of Gabriel.
They don't shut their eyes;
there are stories in the picture houses of their own.
Of lie and deciet.
And guilt and anguish.

They'll never sleep.

They'll howl with the night
and forget why they were meant
to darken their hearts to match the sky.

They'll never glow. They'll never beat.
I'll never sleep. I'll never sleep again.

Kissing you was like swallowing
the salty, salty sea:

I have corals for ribs,
and seaweed limbs;
my bones are ship-wreck saves
and wishful pennies.

My heart is a sea-shell:
if you put your ear to it,
you’ll hear me screaming, shouting,
pining
for you.