You can live without me, and I can live without you, but who's to say we didn't already die.

Our little film set

has been abandoned months ago

but we are still here

stopped acting for cameras

that won’t record anymore

the light around us turned white

and everything blurred

when the dust started setting

on our film reel

laying forgotten in the backroom

of the shut down cinema

with it’s steel roof glistening

in the late afternoon’s sun

we will never be found

encaged in our very own reality

the smallest part of heaven

we were ever granted

all of their faces are red. swollen and fat and full of shame. there is a regret to be had here. there is a lesson to be learned and a moral to be made.

The night is a cold loose shawl that dangles over our shoulders.
It has a secret we are yet to discover
and it shows it through the clouds and the moon.
The moon is a wide grin,
a full circle,
a white and dusty pill.
It hides between clouds,
spying over the mountains,
watching from a far.
It thinks we will hurt it.
We cage the beauty
and mock the ghastly
and everyone that falls in between.
My fingers sink into screens,
falling forward like drips of rain into the concrete.
I am locked to my body
and it feels like a casket
and I panic.
A man plays inside my home.
I can hear his hands move skittishly against the guitar,
distinctly out of tune.
It rustles in the air like stretching leaves in the wind.
The music rapids through me like waves crashing to the shore.
and I bleed into the background scared.
In a crowded place,
I watch a lady dance
and hear the beads in her hair patter upon her bony chest.
Her smile is wide like a crescent moon.
Her silhouette swims out in front of her,
circling endlessly like leaves over departed souls,
soaring up and down;
Her arms flick against it,
She moves like a dying flower caught in the wind.
She is the sky.
She snaps and decays against the cool misty air.
The people progress around her,
they seal her secret with their working bodies.
They are like fleeting clouds,
and I was their moon

Uncle Sam sometimes whispers a little bit too close.
I’ve felt so many scraps scraping against my cheek-
those numerous numberless things he carries in his
beard by ‘accident’. So many things get stuck there
and I feel them all, whenever he dares, and he dares
often, to whisper alittlebittooclose. One time the grey
beard leaned in and touched me in my sleep and
planted in me strange dreams of faraway gothic towers
passing off as libraries: Harvard dreams, Princeton
dreams, Yale dreams: I haven’t quite slept since. The
shaggy scraps stuck to the forest of strands on his face
would never let me. They scratch away at me often
even in the brightness of day, and claw jaggedly in the
darkness of night. Little heart of mine has lost its own
beat. It beats to the beat of a beat on a beat from a beat
with a beat by a beat which beats those beats and beats
beats that beat not of my beat. Little heart of mine, when
did you lose your own pulse? Why won’t you tell your family
that Uncle Sam’s whispers are more than whispers? Why
won’t you tell your family what Uncle Sam does to you
in the brightness of day when everyone is smiling as Uncle
Sam pats your shoulder? Little heart of mine, why doesn’t
your family know what Uncle Sam does in the darkness
of night as he whispers whispers under your whispers and
what he does beneath your skin? Didn’t you know, little heart?
They have laws that say that greybeards shouldn’t be digging
into little boys’ insides, don’t they.

(Uncle Sam has travelled
far and wide, far and wide to tell me lies.
Recall that this is not the first time…)

But little heart you know why. This is not the first time.
It is the natural progression for a Coconut like you:
darkness of night on outside and brightness of day on inside.
Your skin doesn’t matter; you all taste the same.
Cut you off the homeland-tree and cart you all away.
Then, in this way we can say and say the homeland is “Rising”-

Uncle Sam tells the world of his diversity in selection
of little boys to touch with strange dreams.
And I like the feel of the scraps in his beard. Maybe
I can become one of them. One with them.