What if you were poison. This room was a gurney. My parents garage was a time machine. My drawers were a piece of unwritten elementary homework. My bed was a stalemated chess game. Every pair of shoes I've ever worn is one of the beaches I never went swimming at. My laundry were soldier's garbs. I'm living in four minute increments. Two yellow chairs are an empty wine cellar. Two doorknobs an ancient battle field. I have green pants and they might be the entire state of Florida. My book shelf is a poem by Keats, and the books on it are The Village Green. This printer is actually an English love affair. The paper inside of it a pasture, a meadow, and even parts of a rill but not the water in it. I see words scribbled in notebooks and they don't produce melodies. This is a heavy place to use candles. These are the trousers I wear when no one is watching me. Three DVD's tell a story, but no one listens to stories anymore. A carton of cigarettes is a hospital full of people working, a metaphor that doesn't need to be made but should instead be written down. Chocolate bars are all around us, better to keep them quiet. My childhood is drifting off to sleep in a pair of gray sweatpants and a white crew neck t-shirt. Hush Hush. A god hidden inside a scrap of prose that always wanted to hide away but never could. Here are the limbs I'm beating myself to death with. Here are the headaches that I rubbed from your neck; the apple juice and animal crackers that brought both of us back to life, the Wichita suitcase filled with field grains and soy that only made your Grandfather rich. I'm bruise-bent on discussing the never ending. I've filled my head with the status of ritual, I've crossed my legs and enriched my mind with dozens of proverbs, adverbs, and ad lib; nothing that ever once was could be, and nothing that has been could ever be as easy again. Each hill top is a summit worth standing upon. Every picture is a place worth returning to. If every sentence structure and bomb of the mouth was the furnace heating an article at the end of a sentence, or the sentiment with which to generate a sonnet, then mornings could be the clusters to every ache and evolving vowel. Each and every worry would be a giant and the juggernaut which knocked him down. Maybe your ****** is a tooth brush. Maybe mine is just ******. Maybe every inch of my body is made up of locks and caveats. I could retreat to the wilderness, a place where the trees are ornaments to the sky, and the stars are just the songs we don't hear. Heat is a conundrum, the water and the air too. We're longing our way to infinity, chancing ourselves by adhering to dross and sinching our hearts of blood. What if Chicago was the biggest love story of all and I was just not observant enough to notice. I've gone down in three hundred airplanes. What if worry was the tea I declined, heartache the questions I didn't ask and the wishes I never answered. What if your mother was also poison, your sister the true love I unrequitted, your brothers the Roman soldiers which saved us all. I long to be close to the ocean, I retch and thrash, drawing shivers up and down my spine. Here are the shadows aplenty. The heaviest of the hours that save on us like we were up from zero, still and counting on ourselves. These are the lines that I'm petting heavily, washing up and down, left to right, horrific nightmares that come and go as they please. All is left to be said again. Castes are bids meant to be said again. I've been taught to live well even as a quiet mess, to be white while the day's break is still to come. What if leather was the only way I knew how to fly. Bubblebaths the only luxuries I never settled. Your kitchen the last place I felt fully loved. Here is where I reappear. Countries that I've traveled to in languages I taught myself to speak. Wit the wild bunch of berries I crushed into my own craft cocktails. I'm quaffing and I'm trapping. I'm riddled with night and I still can't stand up straight. This is the last place I remember being. Turning over in my gravest stare, and gazing long into the never ending stereotype of my merchant birth and stately hide. This may be the song that sets my tone. This might be the song that describes me best. Never published or punctuated. Always thriving in bated breaths. Always living just an inch from the soon. Here where the moon men trip and fall. Here where the pronouns leave every thing left unsaid.
