How do you measure the distance between satisfaction and settling?
At what speed does wishful thinking blur
beyond a second thought into clear,
emotional ink-work. Haunting, deceptive
, an individual burden laid bare to those loved past the point of return.

I am a novelist without a novel.
An insatiable bipedal need to place it all
on paper, before personal need begins to bend narrative
to match will.

Some days I try to explain myself but everything comes out wrong.
Her face just looks lost and sad.
She wants me to stop trying, but the smile glinting her eye just won’t let me do it.

I’m a coward and I should be shot.


I hate the sky. And I do
that which is parallel to the shrubwork
Bland. Alone on an armless bench.
“I love you” to a cold grey sky. No one has made me say it.
It means everything.

Names most worthy of rumination exist as gnawing, skittering things
scratching at the backside of our brows.
I don’t smile so much as express variations on a skeleton.
A parade of crushed faces in leaves grown auburn.

One morning our cat crawled beneath the porch to die. She
never liked to be touched much. No idea
she was full of tumors
until her sagging body was laid beneath the backyard sod.

It’s a terrible feeling really,
to bear witness to love’s presence.
Hear it. Feel it.
Hands lashed to the asphalt as the smiles rain upon your back.
On those days my spine sags past breaking,
I will beg for more weight.
Perhaps then I can begin to wear your wounds.

The thing about the word unhealthy is that it can only exist
in comparison to other, more appealing options.
In the absence of vegetables,
a diet consisting of processed sugars, caffeine,
and American Spirits raises no red flags.
Broken individuals seem to shine brightest
when they cannot be referenced against those possessing more admirable qualities.

You are the dent in a beautiful spine,
telomerase granting immortality to the cancer.

She is dive bar songs for everyone,
for her,
for this half-drunk moment,
but secretly for you, really.
Dusted in neon smoke your body can’t breathe
but still delicately pack into the corners of each lung,
knowing it can never be exhaled.

For someone so self-professed anxious,
She says lots of words that are not “yeah”.

She is a kiss that tastes like mornings spent reading The Bell Jar.
Long legs twisted into thick comforters, bare skin
close with the desperation of two people who have everything to lose.
Morning hair spread wide and thick. On your backs,
not wanting to move, wondering how
much time you have left. Doing
the math together.
The wrinkle following you through an empty apartment.

Here is proof, evidence.
A human alive; a body in operation.

When She crashes her smile into what’s left of your teeth
it feels like a jaw being broken by sunlight.
Closer to her than anyone,
without knowing a thing about the ashes in the corners of each eye.
Rings with an unsubtle sway from striped dress,
to the edge of your timid fingers.
I know how little a man can do with two hands.

Abandoned toys and worn out shoes have a past
, like the people who used them.

Don’t tell people the reason you have to leave parties early without saying goodbye,
why you stay so close to the exits, ready
to push away any innocent bystander who might be able to help you.
Don’t tell them She’s the voice mumbling
beyond the edge of your lamplight.  
Wondering what Hope means,
if the other end of the text message knows
and what it means to find out.

Some stories end with four shoes on a subway platform,
not caring if you’re stepping into the right train.
Others end in the fields
as the ants clean the bones.

2
Nothing begins
nothing in.

If no valley
is a multiplicity,

Pull nothing similar
away for a moment,

“moment” gives the shapelessness
of a scattering
of occupied beds

Or it’s elephants
in retreat from flesh.

1

You’re courageous
you aren’t afraid to hate
your father
while he still breathes

though you never –
who does “never” distort? –
didn’t detest him

So they’ll divide him right here?
You always renounce the vacancy’s lack of distinction.

But you don’t, he never arrives
from written surrenders.

“Certain breeds of chicken exhibit a behavior known as brooding.
When no Rooster is present they will diligently incubate eggs incapable of hatching,
forgoing food and water
despite the impossibility of newborn chicks.”

It seemed like you had been waiting for quite some time
like collapsed steam on cold coffee surface.

I watched you there
torn apart in the light
shadow fragments packing your edges
away like foreclosed tenants with an immaculately well maintained yard.

By turns violent and mundane,
open mouth smelling of monsoons
and hot morning skin. On the pillowcase
your fingertips bloomed like incandescent daffodils.

Nights posing as days stray forth
and return, with a casual politeness commonly reserved
for political debate spectatorship
and cocktail mixers.

Not quite grim.
Not fully present.
Standing alone in a gleaming room
begging for a sliver of crawling blackness
to tempt the curve of your hip back into my hand.

If there was time left,
I could have figured it out.

“I understand that you are sad and I am sorry.
I told you this would happen. I am
not having this conversation right now,
so I am sorry for that too.”

"That one body may act upon another at a distance
through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else,
is to me so great an absurdity that,
I believe,

Every massive particle in the universe
attracts every other massive particle.
Force directly proportional to the product of their masses,
inversely proportional to the square of the
distance
between them.

Spherically-symmetrical masses attract and
are attracted as if all
their mass were concentrated
at their centers

There is no immediate prospect of identifying the mediator of gravity.
Attempts by physicists to identify the relationship between
gravitational force
and other known fundamental forces are not yet resolved.
Many attempts were made to understand the phenomena,
but there was nothing more that scientists could do at the time.

no man who has in philosophic matters
a competent faculty of thinking
could ever fall into it."

Through the coffee steam your eyes were so clear they almost broke me in half.
I took a long selfish look as I told the side of your head about my mother.
You holding your gaze on my windshield
watching the wet lights blur one mile at a time.
Through the curls of your hair I heard you whisper that you didn’t want to leave.
Didn’t want to add your shoe size
to the prints leading away from the kid who’d see the inside of a coffin
long before he ever saw his family again.

I pulled over to force your hand through my sternum, pierced
each finger with a ragged heart tendril
built in the image of winter trees seeded far from the water line.
In this way, information is filtered.
Even with a cup tied to another cup by taut string,
you still don’t get a clear sound.

I shook my head, thinking of reasons to say your name. A taste like dusty paperbacks
flecked in cane sugar.
You got the boring name because your parents birthed you full of splendor,
knew you would never need the extra flourish of a conversation starting nametag.
The kind of person who deserves someone that will die of malnourishment if your plane ever goes down.

You’ve gotten soft old man,
You are no conqueror.
Will never drown out the roar in her 5 a.m.  mind,
can do nothing to comfort the black eyes
and longneck bottles left wandering her past,
with your piecemeal shards of charm and wit.

Part of your winter still clings to my dashboard and frosts my knuckles
each time my eyes close driving home, dreaming about painting red flags green.
Even after I watched the last drag curl out of your lungs,
you never tasted like smoke,
so I filled my lacerations with your nicotine
to hide inside your numbness,
while our bare skin rolled across sheets
looking for new cold
knowing this is not true sacrifice,
but perhaps my final squander.

Last night I chanted your name into darkened
bathroom glass.
3 times, 9 times, 12.

Hearing nothing, I pressed heart and hands into the drywall,
scraped across rough timber studs
broken off nailheads
felt plaster cake across the backside of my eyelids
as the tops of feet slid over the faucet spigot.

In this manner it is laid visible that words only measure their
weight in context of observable actions.
How much skin are three words worth?
When does lack of sleep meet a limit when laid parallel to “best friend”
, and the connotations seeming safest?
What combination of variables finally bludgeons a heart
until it caves from overpopulated one way streets?

During showers, I understand that I don’t know how to be a friend.
I am an attic where things are stored. If you look
closely her face will appear in my windows,
safe amongst the cardboard and baby photos.

I woke up after midnight on three separate occasions
not from sleep. A sort
of dreaming. Your voice pulled taut against my pier.
So I build fires to shine your way back ashore.

Where we linger, smitten and unhurried.