tender the longing
of days gone
unforgotten.
what luck that all that goes
returns in altered form.

so afraid was i
                                    to put pen to paper

for fear nothing would come, nothing
                                                         ­      would reveal

                                                         ­                    and lo, behold—

                              what chance
                                            to have stumbled
                                    upon this place.


          and but what if all my love turned to dust?
                    it would matte the silence like an untouched skin

                                                           ­  electric

           it came unseen, anterior to knowledge

                                                      ­       exceeding it


desire was the flame, the heat, the function, the burning bright, the sun, the roar and the dance, the play of frivolous gods, the bite, the consuming, the unrest of molten core, spark, flicker

desire was the sea, the waves coming to claim what was only ever borrowed from them, the bounty and breast and beacon of life, that vast graveyard, the unending gift, now peace, now storm

and desire was void and lacked nothing and produced
the real


                                                          ­            and what, for all that,
                                                           ­                       remains?


a quiet collection of dimming experiences
the tender redolence of human encounters
a song and music in the heart, if you are capable of listening carefully
a whole body blessed with the texture of gratitude
laughter—its promise


                                                       ­               an eternal joy, given
                                                           ­           in the senses
                                                          ­            and senselessly          


go now among the strange things of this world
and may your existence be a dance across time


to have dared will always have been
the essential,


                                                    ­       come desert, or mutilation,
                                                                ­                         or even flight

                                                        i­f yet flight.


we do not yet tread among the ashes of the sun.
there is something vaguely familiar to hope in that
at the very least. on.

and so i guess it's a question of whether the possibility
             of being close to each other
is worth enduring the actuality of the distance between us
             that we'll feel all the more sharply in the heart
for having already tasted the fruit of intimacy
             and found that all other delights are unsatisfying
for want of what was and what could yet be
              if it could yet be.

i want to tell her that everything i know about her
               fascinates me
and everything i don't know about her
               excites me.
i want us to be without restraint.
i want to show her and be shown the meaning of unknownness.
i want us to see what two bodies can do
if  you add just a few drops of chaos
and a splash of eternity.

life is eternal in the same way that our field of vision is without
limit.
if you cannot understand this, i cannot teach you.
to understand is what is most difficult of all
and of all the worthiest cause.

—and now there is music all around me, through me,
a zone of indiscernibility between us
—and the details of all these worlds i walk through
become such tiny temples
—and lo, all the texture of my life turned to gratitude
and they said:

look at that crazy ******* dance!

humans will go extinct.
all memory will vanish
like it never happened.
look deep into my eyes
as you take me with passion.

forever taking things apart, not quite
piecing them back together: that was all
we knew, in those idle days of quiet.
our pretty words were leaning how to crawl.

before long we found that we each had wings
that made doorways difficult to walk through.
the worship of imperceptible things,
looking back, without, should have been a clue.

but a series of truly insignificant detours
could not sustain—o blue!—  
                                                    the flight  
                                                        ­     we knew
                                                                ­ as recourse.

there is a girl lying dreamessly on my chest

her name is every name in history
                                             the forgotten ones especially

her skin is an alloy of time and
                                             meaninglessness

the rest is a dream, the real is somewhere
                                             between two infinite zeros

she sighs out of boredom beneath a sky
                                             of countless stars pretending
                                             they're not already dead

everything came into existence thanks to one sublime
                                             mistake, she says, affectlessly

our connection, our laughter, our fears, our
                                             love, all the ******* without end

and it's been mistakes ever since, less and less
                                             sublime, more and more
                                             disappointing

there is a girl lying dreamlessly on my chest

her eyes are populated with divine absences and
                                              machines that disassemble
                                              the beautiful

her hair is the colour of leaves in autumn bloom
                                              and flows into the sea
                                              of unknowable catastrophe

she laughs like an angel of the end times at
                                              the monuments i made her
                                              out of humanity's greatest ideas

they will not survive the present, she tells me
                                              with gleeful abandon

the more you know about something, the less
                                              real it is, she assures me

and i am inclined to believe her, as our bodies blend
                                              as we remember
                                                              that we are
                                                                   nothing more than functions

                            of heat