strands of hair, half-remembered
the sun has shrunk to bone.

light across a bedroom floor
spread brittle, held, lost.

this world deserves nothing
acre lit.

nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing.

in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light, i
treasure you.
the sole familiar thing.

an old, cloying taste
clings to my mouth.
i think you are sleeping.
i know? you are sleeping.
i awoke to silence filled by your silence.
i know you are sleeping;
i felt loved by your silence, still.

i know this is love i imagine for myself in the ways i need it most;
i know how this goes.

in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light,
i allow myself to feel a very real fear that you
will be everything i needed
and almost everything i want.

and so in preparation,
a separation:
i shift and twitch and shiver until i am at once here
and not,
until i am at once here
and in the moment,
some way down the line,
that old, cloying taste magnified,
when all comes to pass as i knew it would and i can say
“i knew it would.”
i know how this goes.

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and i, the one to new york.
when sleep greets me and leans my head
gently
against the window pane,
i will let it come.
i will let it try to fill your absence
in ways i know to be short-lived, for naught,
but i will let it try.

i will miss you when i wake up,
miss the silence that i thought you crafted for me,
but which was really just
silence.
i will miss you when i wake up as i miss you when you are next to me.
i want, for us, something infinite:
that which we cannot have and which you do not want,
hard as i wish you did.

but.
the sun rises —
i know how this goes —
and the misplaced light finds its place again.
the silence i thought you crafted for me, which was really just
silence,
becomes noise.
hectic. colorful without order.
i will miss you when i wake up,
but what ache is strong enough to pull something personal
from all that noise?

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and somewhere in new york i try to live a life as though you have already left me.
if i had my way,
hopeful, futile grasps towards the infinite would not hold ample weight for a haunting.

and yet,
that old, cloying taste.

still.

(a.m.)

eyes easily pleased
devotion to an image

my reality

a skeleton with no bones
dances everywhere
silent letters for teeth
with no talking
its breath in a bag
blowing past the front door
of an abandoned building
with no floor.
a rat trap snapping on a rats back
is percussion.
a dead rat is friend to talk to.
Hunger is invited to an empty table.
the cracks in the paint
scratch and claw up the wall.
the walls excuse
themselves from the room.

the applause of a silent audience
is the stage
filling in the performers tomb.

ahummingbirdlodged
initsthroatchokingit -
laughingandsinginganddying

clappingandhappyandfull
are the people so
dreadfulaheadfullofhorrorandhell

south carolina and ohio and the blurred lines of love and something else. something worse. dangerous. all this talk of coming home. you imagine she means your heart instead of your house. she is held captive by the bounds of her past. all romance and regret. pink wine never tasted good anyway. then again nothing tastes quite like her smile. you could get drunk on her drink of choice every single night and still wake up each morning with a hangover from hell and an empty heart and aching hands. you have got to stop punching those walls. what is it with you. you and hurting things that only exist to protect you. tell us about that night you got so drunk you swore you were speaking to god. tell us how he listened. how you spoke about her candy eyes and her gum drop lips and golden skin. to look at her was to gaze upon the heavens. he understands. you analogize love making to walking into a church and getting to know each and every pew by name. he takes no offense to this. you ask him if south carolina is better for having her in its bounds. you can't quite explain it but ohio feels a lot less like home now that she's gone. you feel like a drifter. she says there are white sand beaches and sunsets you can't even imagine and entire neighborhoods swallowed up by trees. you want to tell her this broken heart of yours is beginning to ache again. as if it ever stopped. you and god share a laugh at this one. you think no one is listening but you are wrong. all this talk of being in love. she says you are in love with the idea of love but she is wrong and she knows it. so what. the million dollar question. what does it all mean and why. god, why. why her, why this, why here, why now, why. but he only shakes his head. in this he says that the answers are nestled in all the moments you mumble his name. when she is moaning yours, when you are scared, when you are happy, when you are relieved. how every moment with her feels like a culmination of each of these. you understand. you do.