Sharpened silver and piercing the roads fan out
From a font of pin-pricking bursts of voice
Splashed outwards in broad tongued strokes
Of spectacle
Banal to only the blunt-minded
Dulled of consciousness.

With every misguided step across rain-slicked cobblestone
Ankles twisted in exhilaration of some unknown gust
Carrying ever northward.

Tender lapping, every particle clings to flesh
Capillaries spread and span the depths of concrete
Mortar and brick beating with the flurry of a wishful chest
Which begs for freedom
In full-throated undying song.

I don't know how to write you and maybe that's the point of it
I think about taxi cabs and single beds and pity my poor stomach
It can't take the shame of fogged memory
Dewed with whiskey and gingerale
Not regret, but it's kin, no fooling.
I don't do regrets
And I've never said a thing that I don't mean
So I meant it when I said it, but the when's important
Because I'm not flippant, or unsteady
But I don't know how I'm feeling.

Just know that I am.
I am feeling.
And I feel that that's significant.

Because I don't want to be a ball of quicksilver
Bright, mercury
Rolling from you in quick, sharp drips
Of poisonous charm.
Don't swallow it.
But do listen.
Just not too much.
Forget I said anything.
I'll stay quiet
Until I know what I'm saying.

Just know that I am feeling
Even if I don't know what I'm feeling.
I am feeling.

I wanted to give him a home
Though I didn't really know what that was.
He didn't feel safe
And I didn't feel safe
And it just seemed to make sense
For me to wrap around him
And shelter him with my hands
To bend backwards, twisting over him
To become walls and windows and fences
And to keep him safe within me
To become for him a home.

There were nights he would cry
And shake against me
And repeat that he could not measure up
To the house I'd built
To the home
And I hushed his cries
For his sake and mine.

I just wanted to give him a home.

There are two marionettes
Facing one another
Parts strung together
And dangling
Like mobiles over a crib.

The first has a head
And a neck
It has shoulders
Strung to fore-arms
Wrists and hands
It has the swell of hips and thighs
But only ever under fabric
It has a face
But no jaw
And only an upper lip
And no forehead.

The second marionette
Grotesque, and barely human
Has two small *******
Clinging to a sternum
Like sad droplets of water
A ribcage spanning
Like thin fingers
Across a chest
A bulbous young stomach
Hips and thighs unclothed, unappealing
Dappled flesh
Calves
Feet
Jaw
Forehead
Balanced precariously atop one another
Joined with a string.

When they step to one another
The marionettes mesh
Make a mess
And cannot escape one another
And move awkwardly
Haphazardly
Trying to conceal the Other
Trying to conceal the whole
Hoping only the string shows.

But the string is tangled
In the parts
Caught between the joints
Obscured by the puppet limbs.

Occasionally, a glimpse.

Did liking my status count
As communication for the day?
Because
I'll be honest
I'm counting how long it's been
Since I was sleeping beside you
And how long til I'll be there again
And filling the measured gap between
With instances of contact
Verbally
Between you and me.

I could die here
Already in my head
You've done all the worst things imaginable
I had us over and done with after the first date
Expecting the very worst
And I could die
And I'm not normally like this
But your lack of texts is holding me over a precipice
And I don't think I could fall any more if I tried.

It's not weird
It just means I like you
And I never like anyone.

I say I worry about her 120
Her 20/20
Her coming home in the evening, pouring a glass
And crying over the past twenty
Or so years
Gone quick as glass
Golden but weak.

She says she can't trust
That I won't get violent
And belligerent
Waking up in bus depots and shouting down phones
Alternating into coughing up whatever words available
To make her understand how much I hate
Everything.

And she gets it
She says
Sort of
The same way I get it
A little bit
I guess
But she worries about my drinking
And I worry about her drinking
And we don't know where he is
Or who he's with.

I can't lie on my back because my *** gets in the way
Forcing my spine into a painful arch
A bridge that won't fall

I can lie on my front because my ******* are too small
But that's no real comfort either

When I run up or down stairs my whole everything ripples
Like the flesh could at any minute just spring off
Imagine, a skeleton on the steps
Ha ha

And that's great about such and such and so and so
And what they're eating or not eating and how they've gotten their busts to grow
And their waists to shrink
But that doesn't make a **** bit of difference
To the skeleton on the steps
Encased in all this flesh.
Thanks for the reminder, though.

I haven't been alive for two years now
I just sit and watch.
I wouldn't even know how to be a person if I tried.
I'll just watch.
I will work and sleep and drink heavily
Internally conversing with people too wonderful to really meet
In my mind forever, they'll die with me, how nice.
In the meantime
I'll keep looking.

He mentioned his mother was getting a hysterectomy
With all of the awkwardness and antsiness I would've expected
And understood absolutely completely
Because I've never had a childhood home
I've never even had a home
At least not in a place but in people I have
But if home is where you come from
Then you're forever homeless
From houses that can be sold
To organs that can be removed
None of us come from anywhere
And everything is subject to change
And terms and conditions
And where I live
The sky is too big.

My mind is no home because I can lose it
My body is no home because it can rot
And people can laugh and question God all they want
But the notion of home is the real ****** of the masses
And where I live
The sky is too big.

After the last call
And the subsequent lock-in
Of the second bar we'd hit
Where we'd sat doing shots
And talking Fitzgerald and Joyce
We took shelter from the downpour
Under the awning of a bodega
Out on Atlantic Avenue.

I clasped your head in my hands,
In emphasis of some joke just told
Before you passed me a poorly rolled cigarette
And I turned for a drag.

Exhaling, I felt your gaze
Penetrate through my lungs' fresh smoke
And fill me full-brimmed
Like a rush of blood.

You grabbed me then
Our faces wet with rain
And gave me the nicest kiss
I'd ever known.

Drawing away
You swore and ****** yourself
For your mistake.
I tried to ride your bike
But fell
My drunken feet entwined in the peddles.

When the rain had stopped
We sat on the hot concrete
And I tried to remember
A song that I wanted you to hear.

We pushed your bike
To the Nevins St. Subway stop
And you stood there
And watched
As I went underground
Before cycling home
Over Brooklyn Bridge.

Sitting outside there
In your shirt sleeves
With your coffee and your cigarette
Wearing those black Ray Bans
That I'd've hated on just about anybody else
You looked just like Jack Keroac.

I couldn't see your eyes
But I liked to think
That you were thinking
Thoughts and things that I couldn't even imagine.
That to you
The world was like one big tangled ball
Of Christmas lights
To sort through
And fix up a little.

When I turned
You were already gone
Your broad hand
Grasping that cigarette.

Someone sane.
Who doesn't care too much
Or not enough.
And who is just insane enough
To still be interesting.
But will stay
And won't project
Or invert.
Someone sane
Who isn't depressed
Or anxious
All the time
And who doesn't mind
When I'm depressed
Or anxious
Sometimes.
Someone sane
Who doesn't hate their father
And won't pass undue judgement
On mine.
Someone sane
Who will be honest when I ask
But will have the sense
To share
With sensitivity.
Someone sane
Who can make me laugh
And whom I can make laugh
Someone sane
Who knows the difference
Between treating someone
Like they're important
And reducing them
To a monolith
They feel they cannot climb.
Someone sane
Who trusts and can be trusted.
Someone sane
Someone sane.

Don't ******* write about me
No, neither for me
Because there is nothing worse
Nothing so utterly despicable
Than the words
Of an infatuated man.

You are not Yeats,
I am not Gonne.
And I like to think
That Laura never died
But rather escaped
From Petrach's lines.

Do not treat what I tell you
As some great epiphany
As anything other
Than the words of a fellow idiot.

All I want
Is to rest
Without
Being called
A ******* muse
Some fuel
For your abhorrent
Creations

That is not me.
You are not Yeats.
But I am gone.

I belong to a fractured consciousness
Whose needle skips and leaps
Relentlessly
Over the cracks.

In any instance,
I can see you
And her
Lithe and writhing
In all her voluptuous vapidness.

Drive on, drive on!
Rock, and reel, and repent.
Repeat.

He's not you
But he's here.
And he lays me down
And says that I'm pretty.
For now, that's enough.

Fact is,
I can't be around you.
Forming words and/or sentences in your presence leaves me
senseless,
stammering,
stuttering,
defenceless
and petering into arbitrary points and references
facts
figures

And it figures that,
were you single to begin with
(which you are not)
And were I of a similar disposition
(which I am)
That facts would form bonds between the figures most infinite,
and timeless,
and primitive -
A joining of two.

Facts are, it doesn't matter
Because in my mind we've done
Worse and better
Richer, poorer
Sicker and sicker.
In my mind we've ****** to the cusp of boredom with each other's forms,
and figures...

Figures that you'd be inaccessible
Unavailable
No one ever really is, are they?
I know for a fact that you love a girl
Who forms her name from words borrowed elsewhere.
I figure you thought her intriguing once,
Fascinating, maybe.
Perhaps you still do.
Maybe it's an envy
Maybe I'm stepping a line but were you mine
There would be no pretense in name or otherwise
I'd be I
You, you...
...I figure.

To be frank and state a fact,
I've dreamt of you often and carved you from a rib in some form or other,
But the fact is
You're a distraction.
And nothing more.

Go figure.

When there's no use living for or against it,
What's the use at all?

We manage.

And we are so cut up inside, you and I,
That it's a wonder the outside
Keeps from caving in

(Does he hear, I wonder?
You, effing and blinding through the night,
with hands pressed and whitening?)

Our arms are our buttresses
Wincing from the weight of crosses upon steeples to bear
Held fast to one another
And shaking from the new brave storm.

We (magnificent) manage.