The day a man needs regulation to plant a seed, is when choice is chided for its existence.
Out of existence.
Reduced to two parties - and we believe without doubt.

When schools and factories will burn along with all bossiness and business, perhaps the land can feel hands dig in again.
Metal needs repose, queues deserve to die.
Rules thrive on Pavlovian tinkles to sink the horrid in, endless gauntlets on repeat.
Time to eat, time to work, time to play, time to die.

The matchstick burns bright, a blaze of life, fizzles right before it gathers thought enough to know.
So too, when the coil burns fulsome and beauty carries fitting, bells go silent in dreams.

Watch my bones extrude
from a thin layer of flesh
stretched over my skeletal form

Is this what control looks like?

Is this how I want to present to the world?
impossibly small
startlingly small

Or should I take up space?
unapologetic and proud

That's the goal
that's the plan
tiny in the distance
a real destination

Concept:
youlovemeback.

The ingredients of cleanse
make their way
to your house.

There is

a

strobe,
two stones portioned off
a Ziggurat,
a present thing —
like wheels,
a teardrop,
nail clippings.

My father
would trim his nails
and bury them —
as seeds.

Stared
at that ***
all days and evenings.
Monsoons and
summer heat echoed.
Time circled back and forth.

Sometimes,

I would gargle
father’s beer and
spit into the ***.
Maybe it needed
Acrid, it needed
Strong. It needed
Disgusting,
Toxic. It wanted

wrong.

I turn 22.
The ***
Disappears. My father
too. Militants
took him away,
or so the chatter goes.
He wore Chinos, sun-dried
eyes, a hat.
Mice ate
the matchsticks
used for kindling.
The Queen Termite
Gave birth to more
hungry little ones
under the sink.
Dark, musty,
collapsing.
Memory, time,
fingertips. Thyme
rhymes

with mime,

I copy my father.
Trims nails.
Plants.
Waters.

Concept:
trytounderstand

This was only the nourish
he could give. It was
a copy of the nourish
his father could give —
Or so

The chatter goes.

Gather the stones.
Get the strobe.
Pound the nail clippings
and

an enzyme flows
Through, like tape recorders whirring
as they wind back to
play recorded confessions
one more time.

Free baptismals
at the church service
for hurried teens.
Free shirts for
the Insufficient.
Free lessons for
the young boy
who can’t read women.

Free at long, long last.

Concept:
fixtheheart