The sunlight
does not breathe on your skin:
it is your skin, the dust,

the specks dancing upon
a blank board. And flaking onto

one dawn foot-print I slip
my limbs between slow, loving
your warm, caramel crooks.

How you rooted yourself into
morning’s peak, and I
am moonlight in
his last nocturnal slumber –

I say you are lit like a
home, not a cloudburst or star

and settle each particle into
porcelain. Cups for two
as if it will fill me up,

swinging inside
my belly, your love is enough
light for the both of us.

I am one of your tastebuds
                know when you like
   something more than I

         crumbling
    crumbling
         we are food

                            we
she has a spice that you like
   and I am too sweet

          I will tear myself out
so you can be free
  to taste better things

your atoms
were broader than
a whole universe

and I stung them
like a jellyfish

mine –
I said, you are
only mine but you
expanded anyhow

perched a white-
bright star

gave me a crater
to sleep in, I swear
there was another

place I needed
to visit while here

perhaps
a velvet bowel –
to remove me

from your system,
or the safe hooked
arteries, a pool of
   blood bleeding

I am cement
and you are a sail

drowning to catch
your fallen threads,
we combust.

You are the soul of wine,
grapes on a vine:

I sip you with my mouth
and lap at you with my tongue,
fork the illusion of bits down
my throat, hopping & hope

this will not be my last glass,
tonight is a celebration:
you bubble inward, far within

my simple mind delved
into the bottle’s head & heart,

but the spirit has not a pulse,
just a rhythm of what
I put inside, the soul of wine.

You saved me, you saved me
but I am still dying –

my head is too humid and
its walls are expanding, rising
found its cot in a mausoleum
gave me air as warm as the

bottom of the sea
deep blue in revival,
and deep you inside of me

have the hedges of your skull
white picket fence turned

red, white picket fence
bleeding and I am welling as
a tear would between flesh
seep to a bruise in the center,
heart purple and ripening

it is obsessive in the way it
drinks me. You
saved me, you saved me
but I am still in the plum sort

of dying –
please get deeper inside or
I will stay empty.

I carved you from sand
each grain pressed together by tears
and your blossoms fall like petals

onto my breast, the man you are
love you harder than a shape:

alive, I will make you square
though you have become muffled
surround the surfacing bits with
a voice that is not yours,

if it is in the ocean, if we are,
not much farther to fall,
you will heave as the gravel does

I can build us higher than a castle
and use a stronger material.

I just got a whiff of you
and the place you stood last,
the corner of my bedroom
where your air simmers fast.

In some ways, it was grey,
a fraction of our whole,
now it has been divided –
but now, you seem so cold.

What was once a bloom
she bit the petals away, wilt
our single lovely air bead
swallowed under her gloom.  

I just got a whiff of you
and the place you stood last,
just here beside me but feels
like something I never had.

there, the long eyelashes

dead in my hands,
oh god, they are dead in my hands
cannot even flutter anymore

but they are wet and they reek
of the bottle caps placed

between my bed and bed sheets
there, the long eyelashes
are weeping

only alive when I am happy
you left, something fled from me

the room was kind of yellow, but pale
shade of a misty afternoon grey
and dully highlighting your face –

I knew it was you,
by the direction of your palm and one
single eyelash slept upon the floor.

it is the blues being in love some days,
but that day was yellow and grey,
raining and hazing your eyelids over.

I thought it would be more milky –
secrete some special substances you
could taste, sweet and as nice as love

breathing wild: how could this
be okay, not comprehend a difference
of one kiss and one yellowing touch,

yet same somehow, yet the same
the room ate some parts of your head
and I fell in love with it despite that –

yellow and grey, bitter rain, I knew it.

The streetlamp colors us,
bleeding light, being on top of things
and all I can see are its circle-spots
drawn on like Communion wine.

I am its wife and its husband,
but every digit has waned to nothing,
must be related to the cold weather.

Only God has memories of such
paper flowers and stems, before real-
ness had happened somehow –
only God grew flora from pavement.

And now the best kind of wild,
the best, most dancing air above our
heads? Does it know the memories

implanted in ourselves, or in it?
I think I must be an android or love,
just a feeling for intoxication
beat the kind of color found inside.

I would have rowed to you
had you not rowed to me, to the city
inside our heads and outside our bodies

and one cracked knuckle was there,
the welcoming committee –
we are inside,  we are inside we are in
the most delicious parts of you and me

I breathe in some scent,
fly into another sector, another crevice
thinking love does the strange things:

I would have rowed to you had you
not rowed to me – I would have
rowed to you had you not rowed to
me. And we drown in each other, baby.

I will show you the ***** parts of us,
and how unsafe their salt tastes,
mended, reckon bliss in this place –
no one kills what they never loved.

Because then it will not matter,
amputees are not fatal, but no one
has amputated their heart or head.  

Each person, each piece is opaque –
but there is something to be seen
inside, the ***** parts we leave
wrestling with us when they speak.

you did not give me flowers,
but I smelled them anyway

bit their stems
and then I tossed them away
down, down, they reeked

into the valve that is my head
the body, capable

they are in the body that
you left –
quickly, too, you did not rot

you looked beautiful
when you left, jumped straight

out of my heart

in the projective sort of way
we are accustomed to

loving each other and leaving
too. you did not give me
flowers but you would have

if you stayed.

A jagged, sharp thing the men love:
is it my teeth? or the knives?

I do not know if the world is getting
bigger, or I am getting smaller –
one would comet a smile into grass,
the safe blades: the green is bliss.

But I am piqued by such shine,
I do not want it in my life, no, it’ll
outweigh love I have cut into pieces
inside.

And it cannot be the teeth: they
are human, though blank as a page.

You are melting into the windshield,
a single bug the wipers hit,
and I never loved you: no, I could
not have desired something like this.

Your flesh does not resemble a
body, nor a human, nor any being I
have felt compassion for somehow.

And your words are jumbled like
lyrics repeated out of tune. I do not
know you, bug, I do not love you.

I have noticed that you do not bleed,
although your murmurs are pained
of a pink sort of memory
from your live, a single human day.

Some witch, blocks of lavender
and spice and bricks, will pick you:
she will grant a single human wish.

May she find some use of you,
the single bug I have slaughtered so,
but recall that when I killed you,
you were something I did not know.

Jesus looks so ruby red, dead
and your purring
wracks some embryo to

life, gave it a foreign ring –
hand-tested gold or
diamond surfaced from oceans:

or not, no.
No, it is just a mirror
and you are what makes it

look so beautiful, breathing
sea-salt and gasoline –
one perfect drop found a well

and down, down, down
it fell. I caught ants, I smashed
in their hissing heads.

Yes, yes, so red.
God would be proud of the
mystery you and I have kept.

We drag him along like a light,
lantern bleaching flame,
but as soon as the sun hits,

he, too, drops into a haze –
and lands cross-legged, think?
There is a jeweler up there

that makes his ankles shine,
they are bolder than the moon
cousin of his best side,

as you are mine. Mine,
some sort of wordly delight –
bravery, diamond, and be alive.

There is some decadent rise
limp during afternoon highs and
pulsing at moonlight, the morning
knows something I do not know –

glowing, too, at the clarity
the cut of one’s sum, you and I

we are constructed of limbs and
dumb ligaments, bolted joints
and pivots: but most of all,

tissues that bleed when separated,
is that the value our love holds?
Do our nerves have common
apexes, the sapphire ends?

How we glisten and shine,
but do not feel when torn apart –

I sometimes feel like a classic
piano you are playing, one white
key tortured by the skin that does
not match any other’s but yours,
my player’s, retching for noise.

And I will give louder than
midnight howls of a single man,
his fingers fell from his hand –

he knows the morning such as I,
waking up just to decay,

while muscles keep their color,
the sun, or absence of, gives clues:
like footprints, a duet in sand,
I should not wake up without you.

he is pulling snails from my petticoat
making sure their antennae do not grow
and left feeling such as candlewax,

flesh walls seep from under their
pulsing bottoms, the apex of one head

and I am the girl it is given to, a gift
******* at my breast –

how uncomfortable to be the center of
such longing, being touched and
fingered with when something does
not belong into your body’s crevices

pressing, oh, like candlewax –
I know he removes them because he

loves, but I want them to stay
because they love me just as much,
dyed pink against my body, snail hugs.

Wotton Hill, you are a cage
for my wife’s deceased body and
my mind, blushing furiously as
I recall our times –

twenty spokes for those who
climb ladders backwards, the trees
leaves spilling into a driveway

and I would bundle the biggest
under my jacket, or my hat,
even a tulip for her bonnet’s tip.

She looked like a Redcoat,
and I, midnight’s dove,
lingering on some lane far from
our home, golden even for us,

fell back on a landscape of
solstice, each pine has a lady
inside waiting to be released for
God’s unheeding eyes:

when he weeps for his children,
I do not remember mine, but
my wife along dusty ways

and singing her seasonless song,
with every color flora against
her scalp, her retinas, her breast.

She looked her best when
she was guarding a sad head –
Wotton Hill bringing her face to
one heart-shaped windowpane

swaying in forest unhappiness
and now along this circlet,
my wife lays dead.

I was supposedly a girl much louder
than any other, talking to no one and myself
until father rushed to purchase the glue,
piecing me together, a wrinkled jigsaw puzzle
and now I cannot speak to him anymore.

Nor anyone else, the men or women
not even the babies howling to cradlelace:
if one asked for me to pull them out, I
would claim that they are conjoined twins.

Only me and the pad of paper I ******,
it rests on my ***** or under an armpit,
but worse are the sleeping crates
inside my mind, a door and a handle holding
one another like lips not coming undone.

Please speak again, they say,
they do not know I can completely do it
just not with the maggots swarming through:

please, though, put my lips back, I write,
as if I had not split them apart already
and ate the frosting they laced each with,
I will be a child whose cradle they’re inside
supposedly an infant with much louder cries.

you could mend me a little bit
stomped and right
kissing your golden eyes

when I awake, there is the sun
of another morning
and another morning song

in front of me, thing of beauty
batting his eyelids
breathing something in

could it be me –
the broken doll of dreams
or something more, glistening?

I see such a tempest riding by
rain glitters on us
a window shows love cry

and you could mend me
a little bit, while my scents you
keep breathing in.

It is watery, and yet so much like honey,
the height gained rivaling mountains
but peaches frame you –

something more smooth than a kiss,
saliva pinked with blood, drooling down
one chin or tongue, I have touched

close, but not quite smeared with
my fingerprints, not even a wrinkle or
particle of body’s flaking dust,

just a sphere of constant traffic,
you meet the veiny shapes when all
else blackens, the chime of hearts I know

one I have handed to you, chirping
beating with no highlights of an earth
just keeping brunette, blonde baby blues.

Now, she is a ghost
as your grandfather would be
had he lived in such a time one exists,
the Air Force veteran sort of pilot
and green blankets for feet,
looking ready to lie, mermaid fin.

Ghosts are such glassy things,
fragile. They are almost always
shattering for some reason.

Or another, picking roses upon
sheaths and tufts of a garden home,
these thorns appear more complicated
than the ones down south,
more intricate or something so.

As she floats upon the wormbeds,
a daisy blossoms like teacups
sat in a line of a dozen knives, to ****
her once more: the foul columns.

This can be a myth,
had it not been an empty ivy vine
choking her heart and making her a
sheet, she glitters near invisible
and must be upstairs with
your grandfather’s veteran friends:

and know, yes, the crystal is real
but ghosts do not exist
until far beyond their death.

among them, the lilies
you **** their froglegs and lavender
shades smelling of roses or
pond water

and you are teething again,

a child
sometimes with a pain so swelling
it shoots colored rockets
through your vein

the last that you could have,
snapped & floating

you do not feel anymore
hence the sinking of ships before
the draining of a lake before
killing lilies

that threaten you
more than arrows into your face

I hate this attic I have become,
full of dusty things and second thoughts
getting good use of a ***** old trunk
it is my bed, flattened boards into a cot.

Inside are the rotten brain-cells
where I construct every bottled-up plan
pursed, then shattered on their shelf
blood on my cheeks, I blush for the man.

O, he pushes into my womb,
to be used as the deepest keeping place
and I will wither into the closet soon
the parasite inside me, I need a final case.

Wilt farther, I know I shall
as men, bloodsuckers, open my bowels.

Your
        desperate Eve,
  so turquoise

sprout an inkling
        of sense

and give it a pouch
to sleep
      within

not this
    crowded place

  and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so  
     dark

    perhaps your
Luna lives

            she
is deflowered
   she will be okay

stretched
    like taffy

              for a man
The scarlet she has
  hidden

       everything else
will rot

   and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so
   dark

    Eve lasting.

You move on all fours, hands are your feet
getting pink-breasted by a garden tulip
and roses gather your thorns to a side street
where we once met, in love just enough.

There was much in that café sort of city,
I thought it was Christmas even in summer:
even on a grey day, you made it pretty
while the clouds so septic, swept me under.

Could not digest the place that is love,
for it felt overgrown and I was just a guest
dining with what is pure, nesting doves:
the meal charcoaled my stomach to unrest.

And I learned that a stationary loving
   is not worth a lifetime of running.

Six feet away, a gun sleeps
              on the sidewalk

pulsing

and I swear vows break
every minute,
     why should this one concern
                 me? Feels like

arsenic
       dripping through my
     body, the veins.

              and I turn white
                                     for it,
   but the trigger is black
midnight

   is always speaking to me,
break this vow,
        or  the vow will break me.

a billion hearts,
their circle
   & linking

      they look
   so much like
a star

i once tasted
          lingering

I am not here: I am exhausted,

I become a clothing heap on your floor
the silent mountain of snow & dust,
you can pick me up,
but surely, I will glide back down.

I am not here when I need sleep,
rather an exact, watercolor painting
that does not match my soul.
Too sharp, or too fuzzy –

my eyes are oceans glazed by iceforms,
I have not the courage to see.

I am not here: I am exhausted,

I am intoxicated by your memories,
handsome bubble and the falling under
you are the tightrope I am walking,
want to love, but cannot breathe.

Morning keeps me guessing,
and feelings are  
                                        sliding.

humming buzzard

your
    self. and
  me me me me
being open
     this is living!

flying over people
     it does not matter
if you don’t breathe

as long
   as you
      are with
your wings & teeth

           masticate their
songlets.

your
   self. and
me.

humming buzzard
                fly
                    ing.

I did not bloom
  
     pink
underground
    summerless bulb

              mostly the
undercooked appearance

and gutty roar
         I did not bloom

     although it appears
that way –

speckled rose
with spread wings
                eating her days

     like knives
feeling small & summits

             I was born:
Worldly, sharp,
        the deranged.

why
is it that I
have a feeling soul

cloudbursts
sunbursts, of you

a ghost
so thin I did
not know

you had eyes
and could feel me

even as I feel
alone

man
           speaking
   you are
the weather

in my
bones

like snowbursts
     livid air,
so(ul).

Tomorrow morning, I will be your
      ghost again
            breathing salt into the
    wounds God left you healing.

                    Refection of
a flame that gives mist
     and winglets paling, I have
        arms that give night to girls
I have saliva that rises any deadman.

    Solstice, when do
  the dawns stop chilling? When
                 does warmth grow?

    Winter has had enough,
checking into a glass motel room:
                                  break the floor
    and call on a waitress to pick
it back up.

             I watch you sterilized
   perceived the tip of the iceburg
                            like a gift –

you must be leaving, sir, and
           get better once again.
                 before God pulls you in
        white’s chilly, and the morning is.

most girls are simply
peacocks
and cliffs, a pair of mountains

house their dangling
hips

but the snow
is kind of blue at midnight
most girls look sick

when eternal is just it

she she she
has a dislocated shoulder

she she she
is as empty inside

most girls are bright
but jump off from cliffs
sometimes

I have made a new skin for you twenty-six times
the cells, a telescope or our children
having lunch on my favorite parts of you –

sometimes their lips’ pressure made you cross
chattering like a bug on summer screen doors,
and you would turn them blue. Aching,

they would plead for a larger bruise,
discolorations that would give plenty of room
for the fresh cells I am growing, giving life.

These make you smile for their thirty-five days
spread across my hips and the waves
rocking the sun, radiance to burn your side,

the teeter-totter into your flesh –
I remember that you love me again and
have, too, given me new skin twenty-six times

but yours is built much like a fire, heat ambling
to my chest left and farther to the right,
every cell becoming one skin, waves high tide.

I see you in the same light of ghosts –
in shadows, against walls
the little bricks that falter as I walk

you are more than meets the eye,
because I barely even see you.

I cannot touch you
or you will evaporate, like water
like a wave that washes away dawn.

Each morning is a phantom,
nothing to be held within my arms.

I see you in the same light of ghosts –
the shivering image I take
in my head, a dream I have made.

Palm-brained, more sweet than salty
you do not wilt and you do not expand:
cats always land on their feet,

I worry like your owner. He may fall,
he may stoop on his knees a fateful day!

And the ripples seeming ocean waves,
pale as an eye’s center, brine inside
your skin goes a particular way beneath
curdled fur, covered you so –

you are a still a ****** to my hands,
though I have tongued your fleece case
there is the special salt pulsing below.

We are bigger than sin, we have size on
huffing waters. They are wafers –

lanterns, their latches open and shut
but we say the same: I worry & you haze
not concerned that I will jump,
girls are like cats landing on their feet

girls who fall because they believe
their palm, a parachute is expanding.

my kind is wholly
found in white weather, with scarves
                 clasped around our air

I do not know the name of your colors,
they all mate with each other
and come out curiously, like priests
heaving Bibles in that basketball façade
your whites and pinks fit their sort of face.

Yet it stirs some type of discomfort,
also unidentifiable and costly –
these hours, we are not.

You cannot be when I cannot breathe
another shade of blueberries, so fat and
birthing their seeds. Resigned to
their train-track coloring but dreamy,

moonlike, thinking about nothing
and being everything  as tall as a steeple
then as short as Communion glasses.

Say these must be the violets,
in the golden stems and grape heads
found by a grass pit: just like your eyes!
as if artificially placed inside, before you
could only see in black and white.

I do not know the name of your colors
except by the weight of things,
paper & plastic, bows & bird wings,
these heavens I discover on your seams.

His illuminate
     head surfacing like a balloon
tied to a child’s wrist, mine
         bandage like gauze
               I pull him down and
      he brings me back up.

             Found a quiet space
   inside that no one has touched
so empty, can I fill you?
          Can I make it as bright as
                   your illuminate head?

   Wait within the gaps
until the blood pools around
        and drowns me.
             God, to be full finally –
      I wait and wait and wait,
I will give you this body
         the roundness you deserve.

Flushed
    and illuminate, my all,
the thorn I pluck into your hip
            exploding balloon
               now a rose expanding
    you are full in the center,
me, the hurricane eye.

I used to be afraid of my saliva
the soapy buds on my tongue and gums,
afraid that at night, they would drown me:
and I would spiral into the clutches of
my throat, fleshy & claustrophobic.

Now, I dream of such tight places
and how water may wash me to a place
where I will be contained for just seconds
too long. Asleep, the doctors look like
comets bursting above my eyelids.

Drool, the culprit dripping down
my chin gives them the satisfaction of a
final goodbye, if not to cleanse my
life just before she ends.

you are the stain on my skin,
the “i’m sorry” cuts bandage

& pinker than a girl’s insides
we have the ballad of crying

my feet in front of yours: it is
a contagious fever, our sobs

built upon lapses of euphoria
you give me reasons to come

my senses, my fingers are on
strings to not wring my neck

northern pinnacle you have &
gallop around my heart-lines

this is just where you belong:
on & in me through my finale.

The dark sky has constellations –
it reminds me of you against my body,
forlorn indents of other men’s teeth

now you lick and heal, they left me to
bleed.

Your white washes grain between
my toes: once infected by the smallest
corner of fungus from his mind.

Precede to the moments I am made of,
each second with you I am also
stuck with me,

needing to be healed and revived.
With you, I cannot be hollow anymore.

But I can hollow you, constellations
against a dark sky. I worry that
the sun will burn you like it did me
hiding behind those other men’s teeth.

Windsor, and kite seats –
I see that we are snowed in to the sky
clouds have come half-removing themselves
to be just oxygen orbs, little pods
of white. So much like an eye
without a pupil, or a tulip budding wide.

She is beautiful but sad, salty sad
inhaling it as a fume
the smoke that does not disintegrate
giving her cancer of the brain.

These sails flap like torn skin,
pale and cleaned of the internal things.
Clouds feel that champagne-bottle way –
fizz hopping from their stomachs
and spread her melancholy east, then west.

We give it to you, gentleman,
with these outstretched ***** for hugs
infect you and cough on the ones we love.

But you are not yet stuck –
barren, frozen, these skypanes in ivory
unlock their mouths for weather to swallow
and only get the sad, salty sadness,
white winters infected by dirt.
Clouds told they can fly, but it still hurts.

I feel most like a ****** when I am cold
         the pale daughter of snowflakes
not to be touched with fingertips.

             But by tongue –
it is the skin that beats my laughter
and halting me through ice.

No man can separate my wings or he’ll
          freeze, become attached to me.
obstinate as a glacier who sleeps.