everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine:

love is not blindness and his especially
his love was not blindness
he saw everything:
what was there
what wasn’t

nonetheless he rested at reading-glass distance
everything in hyperfocus and bigger, like he wanted
like a futuristic camera: oversaturated, overbright

love is not blindness—

love is literature, or wine, or a lens flare
his filled my gaps with what he wanted there
he saw more than the camera did

I cannot condemn, nor could I ever, his amber propensity
to imagine me. to beg literature is a dodge
of responsibility of which we are all
most equally
guilty

and the devil is in the details
that stitched up such an
achingly different forever
than the one he saw

love is not blindness—
his wasn’t, and mine wasn’t
—but it is literature: permission to fill the page
permission to distrust, like I did then
like I do still

forgive me my own amber propensity
to feel the paradox
there

The Night Sky

Taking a walk and it’s late, dark out,
sky full of clouds.
Family in beds, sleeping.
Watching rows upon rows of feral shadow clouds roll
across the sky in heavy sheets.
Air is charged, crackling from the energy
of my body as I walk by naked.
I have stolen the stars tonight.
Walking slowly, no thoughts,
my feet among the trees
trees blades of grass my immense form looking down
At mountains the size of mole hills
aerial, seeing as the raptor must.
Granted immense powers such as hyperfocus and
watching buck leap elegantly miles below.
Body is now composed of innumerable celestial bodies
Time is become me,
Form curving elegantly
fabric of spacetime billowing
in the crystalline winter wind.
As I walk I am everything and nothing.
The universe breathes throughout me
stellar nebulas exhale clouds of interstellar gas and dust
across my chest up my arms and neck red giants and
supergiants my legs erupting supernova, black holes
behind my knees across my face trillions of asteroids and
meteoroids sailing coming together in fantastic collisions
all this and looking up the night sky,
Devoid,
clouds moving quick under nothing absolute nothing.

Puff, puff, puff
Watching my death blow from my mouth
I feel it settling in
Making me feel like the world is in hyperfocus
Details find their way to the surface
I stare at the ceiling as it feels like the world is swaying
I wish I was staying
Falling and I can't find my grace
I let my fingers fumble with the next mistake
Each puff and I feel dead
To each their own aphrodisiac

My body likes
to be the thing
you fidget with.

So, feel free
to come and
hyperfocus
with me.