Taken, this only route to the back of something blacker.
I left my fingernails to protest in the floorboard,
stuck, sticking still
white headstones for things I cannot remember.
Pale ghosts of my
tenacity
before it strode cross the threshold into a gentle night.

I piled like garbage in the corner,
an anthill
phenomenally empty.
This, my house of skin,
ice dispensers and salt,
brewing something foul,
I inflate, churning charcoal

in the corner,
out the door,
heaving hell.

My shoulders have grown weary under your enormous
gravity.
Like the sick summer nights in your breath,
I have congealed on the foyer,
unable, unwilling to draw myself up.

Night falls and all the things that have been hiding in me come out,
and I feel your curving absence
and I am alone,
some place far away where the memory of your voice still echoes,
a moth against a lantern in my throat.

I feel you moving in the stillness of sleep,
in that place between dream and death
where your breath still lingers
like spiders under my skin.

There was an asphalt road along which I walked my childhood
In the warmth of the summers, in the warmth of careless feet
And strawberries strung on wild grass.
The juice of the sun on our cheeks dripped and
We were golden, rugged tar beneath our soles.
My feet were black in the summer.
A child, the sky over my head was too large,
A blue in which I lost myself should I look up.
So I watched the road.

The sun never set on us, but bathed us in the unearthly gold of night.
It washed away tomorrow, it washed away the day past.
It washed away sound but for the far-away buzz of birds and traffic.
The asphalt was always warm after the glow of the day,
And beneath my feet I could feel the tires of cars long gone.
Someday I’d be the driver, too busy to meet the road,
Too busy to walk down my old friend in the evening sun,
But that was far away and my feet were young.

My mind is clear, early winter
Bathes the landscape in its abandon.
There is no room for you here.

The dewy chill has numbed me,
the storms of our summers
are memory in the fog of my breath.

Here I loved you in my summer.
Here the grass is brown, as your eyes.
But my mind is clear

You are ice, forgotten
With only the ghost of my touch.
A breath.

There is no room for me here -
There will be no summer for me.

Draw your foul tongue
out of the depths of your sleep.
The day has fermented
on your breath.
Draw your torpid mind
to the surface of your skin
and feel my
electricity.
It’s late, and you *****
your words.
So you close your eyes and
heave out the day.
But in the morning,
when your tongue is light,
when your breath is easy,
you will touch your lips to my ear
and whisper something warm
and weary.