pour sunlight down my throat, it burns
like a whiskey secret taken to grave: my chest

is a bed of incarnadine moss
where i retire and lie, not knowing — waiting for
death or life, for
words to be purified by fire
the size of my live-coal heart;

what is there to write
out of it anyway? after all,
i am now incomprehensible to myself.

here, i confess my sins, absurd in their triviality,
but the sky hears, declares a sentence, unforgiving.
i cannot hear, for

i am now incomprehensible to myself
as i **** my nails clean of dirt, of meaning,
like a poem; emptiness is just a blank slate
not knowing where it's headed.

here, sunsets lick my bones clean — its tongue has long stopped burning
from inside the numbing walls
of a coffin: my skin is the pall draped over —
aventurescent-white under the fevered sun.

You keep me
afloat
on my worst days,
dear-sterling-
silver-lining-
moon-framed-
starry-eyed
lover
of mine.
Do keep
me
ever after
in your lifeline.

i have inherited pandora's careless melancholy, her tiny box of regrets, her white-washed, quiet horrors and terrible decisions — staining like a memory passed down from her reckless hands to my old, ***** claws, digging for something raw, something parasitic, something miserable, something always goes wrong beneath my ribs. it wants out, like a beast, a misplace fragment, an aphid. and these days turn their heads away — blur themselves blind before my many blunders.

before the wrath of a false god, will my bones ever learn the art of being unapologetic?

will my hands ever forget the habit of clawing my own wounds for warmth? i lay my vulnerably human skin on sun-dried poems written to breathe, breathe, breathe in — breathe through january's oppressive cold.


i breathe out a mouthful of asphyxiated flowers

Without so much as a burst of white light, without so much as a beclouded face, lingering — I want to go quietly now, like sawdust in a country road — like seafoam under a gray sunset.

My mind insists on leaving.

out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.

i am half of a sun-dried breath short of being sane. i sigh and my body bathes in a mouthful of bleeding, blue december — i can feel its colder, longer days stretching inside me.

i wish january comes here soon — in fresh, comforting, yellow warmth.

i.
i carve the sadness out of my ribs like well-soaked marrows;
they fall off like a drunken secret —
a poem within a poem within a night-long quietude

that i disturb
like a child's stomping feet among the prairie dusk.

ii.
i carve a poem,
whole and out of my tightened throat
like a reverse magic trick,
but my hands break in casual irony.
i carve a word out of my tongue
but all it does is bleed.

iii.
i carve a feeling out of a callus but
my paper-skin is left too long under a lavender storm
to still write letters like these.

iv.
the sky cries to a drunken oblivion
as i unwrite this poem in indifference.
i let myself go, like that

dead houseplant drooping in corner of my room

and cheerless, quiescent sheets
watch to pass time.