the world ends: it looks like an empty bed,
sheets running under your body the night before,
a faux lace dress caught in aventurine nails —
it fits like a memory, clings like an emptiness worn well.

together, we turned our backs on the saints,
but i pray to them like i haven't
forgotten a word; surely,
a plea is bound to keep you here
just long enough for me to forget:

the world ends: it looks like the corner table
where i last saw you; i pocket
my dizzying daydreams from across the street
and walk past a wormhole.

the world ends: it looks like wounded lips — pink daffodils
drunk on the slight touch of our fingers;
nothing heals from this.
new lovers will zip my skin open so carefully, with their
untainted hands
and find you buried; i never loved you
is all i say.

the world ends: it looks like a forgotten year
and some souls are always the first ones to leave
but i empty my veins, dredge up relics of your presence —
it still leaves me
disconcerted, breathless;
i pour my love in a letter, in paper flowers
and my tainted hands still find you buried:
a secret i can never keep
so i let you go
is all i say.

the stars weep over all the terrible ways i have loved you —
dress you in their light caught
in my aprium kisses and cigarette daydreams.
empty my ametrine veins,
disembodied to hold your bones together —
kiss you, break me, leave me
burning and trapped in a lantern room; watch me
sink ships to come back to your arms; you've always waited.
and they all still weep and fall
over all the terrible ways i'll still love you

long after they die.

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.