i can still feel it — the ghostly echo of storm clouds it in my throat, now dry and emptied of the softest sighs. they all had fallen on my flower-bed skin, pristine as the petals that once were. or so i pretend. i can still feel it in my throat: the storm, looming. the calm drowning itself, and its haunting, beckoning call to which my feet slowly walk.

some days, it's just you and the uncharted depths of your own skin.

some days, you can bother with poems — some days, you can only drown.

rays of light strike the wall where a window should be. the hurricane is over, we haven't yet taken down the boards.
the thing about the storm is how exhausting it can be. it can take so much out of you that all you can muster is enough energy to think. hours expended in forceful trance don't quite seem like hours at all.
more like something else entirely.

i rest my head on the back of a ratty couch. there's a coffee table before me that i'd like to prop my feet on if only i had the strength to. i notice Elizabeth cross legged atop it. she's smaller than i remember. not in the way of height or weight, but in a way i can't quite put my finger on. she looks straight through the boards on the window, though i feel her gaze on me.

a few minutes have gone away. following their departure, Elizabeth turns to me and asks,
"do you remember me from somewhere?"

some of the dryness will bleach from pithing
your noetic strands and the rest, a ****
prinked rind deluded.

i dip cupped hands into the lowlands, scraping
fractal mold flakes captioned, answers in light
crowded lenses.

cubic rift, that, i will toss adoration engines,
in the end, the goddess of substance will
not react.

not retrace, not the rift. mortaled caper,
inflection of the flats, grinded
reactions. grinding thoughts
grounded.

scribbled to-dos spreading forth, immurdered.
tokenized spice cabinets, enter rift
refuge. the caper collapses on molar-novas,
solar lepidoptera folding in your hair.

the sweat-between-us hive. the separatist mind.
salt mines alarm us, a subject deepened
between two gestures. have you the stratum
of intention?

germinal grains, embryonic clock tower -
mineral lies don timescales
tucked in our hereafter mattress.

i will deathlessly dry with a towel
unless i’m showering with it, a full commit
to the status kiss.

[after all that, you still love me,
in the bedlam trees the choral key,
the old oak door embroidery
are pieces of me scattered (spelled) naturally.]

i like how the clouds come down, pick up my spit, then leave. are they hiring? every time i fail, i draw a chicken with a mini mindflayer crawling under its naked skin. some day they might look convincing enough to be seized by the authorities. a kid got the best of me when i was five trading cards for the real deal. don’t stop smelling the cheese, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the competition keeps me on my toes. are they tiring? every time i fail, i pick a name from a hat and mentally execute all those people. some day they might be convinced to drop dead. a bird got the best of me when the birch called us the real deal. the walls aren’t closing in, i said to the maze rat.

i like how my rorshach lungs are little Kara Walker demons in dresses silhouetted when they turn the x-rays upside down. am i expiring? every time i fail, i inhale, bring it in, until i feel wing-clipped and start coughing tar snot. hive mind got the best of me, the rules of engaging reality come with a coronary deal. the little beats are meaning something, i said to the maze rat.

i like how i have two temples, and each one gets a special drill bit from my spirit. am i unwiring? every time i fail, there’s a countdown that starts and drops to absolutely nothing then leaves. knowing got the best of me, a cinematic coronation for the mediocre is the reel deal. they never stop watching, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the am-i questions get the best of me in a real deal, i said to the maze rat

it was a kiss with coyote’s embouchure, with the river’s casket, with gelified venom, with the apron’s appetite, with compact distortion around portable lip cuffs, with trite lies liquified, with mud clumps in mercury clasps, with spit woven theses, with unwound ovoid wellsprings, with sun-hidden shadows, with the frayed nighttime squish, with closeted hand dice tossed, with chance in the fistfuls, with detuned static and bellyaching bramble, with losing yourself, with entropic dissociation, with fleeting tokens, with sayonara stamps, with honey pumping nozzles, with inside out stratus veins, with the pain of history tucked in the trail fringe, in the pebbles kicked outward, with fried abandon, with seatless balconies, with the touch of an insect unexpected while straddling a brick wall with electric grout, with eyelashes trimed by the wind, with patterns passed, with breathless shapes and shaping dimensions, without the taste of lavender or the mosquito’s lonely thirst, with time passing, with time passing, with time passing, without passing time, with the sky dumping elected dead bodies, with spoonfuls of miracles, with starvation kicking, with moon swells forgetting the fomite sea, with weather inside, with dry mouth drawer memories, with omens and herrings with teeth and tongue.

i used to spend a long time with you and thinking about you.
i would write and sing yarns and threads of your life.
we busied ourselves for hours, days, away from
just about whatever it was that kept me sad.
it seems like a lot of years have passed
and even though we're still so close
it seems more and more like i,
just can't spare the effort to.
i love you and always will
don't think that changes
but i can't write letters
or play pretend with,
all my secret friends
i just feel tired yet,
not forgotten or
alone or lost or
is there a way,
an expression
of how wiser
but without
motivation
i feel now?

maybe just
fully lucid
and aware
the clarity
of a mind
only idle
that life
my life
wasn't
worth
much
at all.
how
sad.

and that it wasn't worth the fatigue it took to get here. but what can i do? i am at a dead-end, there is nowhere to go. if i write a longer line, i break the trend. the trend wasn't even very good to begin with. i think a few of those lines are too long for the pattern. i spent some minutes trying to resolve them but i wasn't satisfied.

in truth, though it often takes that idled age to realize, past the self-conscious judgement and harsh, masochistic self-critique
the point is not to be unique or force anything.
it's to express the heart,
because that's not something anyone gets to do very often, especially not to strangers.

if i've gone long past being frightened of death or spiders, i'd expect some words to not spur my anxiety so much.

anxiety is just that; fear of my, your own unreasonable expectations
not the fear of being ridiculed, or the complex fear of success;
not even a fear of being hated, or forgotten and never remembered
it's the fear of never being known to even be forgotten
that awful dreadful horror of not being noticed at all.
not becoming stronger as an individual, but less.
and it can be fatal.

Birds of a feather flock together in the sultry atmosphere, whirring in and out of crepuscular clouds as if it were nothing special. feathers more like needles blacked under the godless face of the wind. The cliff's voice clings to their sun-smeared backs, reminds them of his own position on an empty, red planet and they sing back that gravity lament. The sky goes on about the lovely morning air and sunlight marches when all birds want is a place to lie down from that brittle flight, to rest their hollow bones filled with a lost longing.

i need a safe place to take off my skin and scoop out all the sorrows it carries. it peels. it burns, like a banished soul. but i have stopped saying my prayers — they just crumble into a ghostly sigh. i need a safe place — to take a peek at my demons without looking like one of them: a hurtful father. a forsaken son. a snake that sheds its memories and sins. i need a safe place to still my breathing — without my fingers pressed on a bruise and without my hands around neck. i need a safe place — a place away from all these thoughts, away from all these hurting. away from all of me.

I can never walk away from you. Not by the gods who all looked on as I ran out of reasons to make you stay. Not by the forget-me-nots I willed to die under my pillow. Not by the poems you never knew were yours. Between us, I can never be the first one who leaves because I'm terrified — of you, moving on to a life I'm not a part of. I'm terrified of confronting the choking weight of emptiness in cold mornings.

To walk away from this is something I never learned; that is my downfall and your strength. And I guess the difference between us is when I said that I was terrified of you leaving — when I said that I was terrified of losing you, I meant it.

I meant every word of it, my love — I meant every word that you did not.