surrounded by icy flood, we float, haggard in the snow, drenched in a certain kind of nostalgia. i like the greek version better, the bend of the tongue, nohstahlllgeia. we have always been like this, on the bend of the tongue while icicles swam up our sleeves and my mouth found your breast. have you been bad? she smiles, slides an arm around me, pulls me near, i have been very naughty. and we dance, we dance, while winter drowns the rest of this little town into submission

you have to wonder if this possible has been exhausted, a tire blown and remnants of torn rubber strewn across the highway. i had driven many miles and the sun used to be blaring, an angry god for my lack of sleep. but the city was straight lines and although cold, the night was appealing. she marked her territory well.

Somehow we find a way through it, me myself and I, this jumbled presence of a person with runny noses and bruised knuckles and lungs filled with lead.
Somehow, she says, you talk yourself out of anything.
I choke until we are all laughing.

“one more dedicated peaceful moment
just give me one more dedicated peace moment”
-a perfect circle, “Orestes”
just one moment not out of rage or sorrow, one moment broken free from all the rest, an icicle driven through my lip, limbs into trees into fingers into eyes into love into skin without wounds, scars without pain, laughter without despair.
i drove myself into brick walls to feel bones crack through battered muscle and the swell of my cheek bruised into a bright blue and purple specked with blood and the uneasy feeling that yet this wasn’t enough, still not enough, all this not ever enough.

there is nothing i cannot do. but there is nothing i can undo. the paradox of your heel, the stretch of my neck, this memory that will not leave me alone, tortured comfort. we are all things, skin twisted against the bone, a lip caught on barb wire, a tooth scraped against concrete.
i had held you against the night with some flimsy promise we made to each other but only you made it to the dawn while i shattered in the sun

there is nothing i cannot do. but there is nothing i can undo. the paradox of your heel, the stretch of my neck, this memory that will not leave me alone, tortured comfort. we are all things, skin twisted against the bone, a lip caught on barb wire, a tooth scraped against concrete.
i had held you against the night with some flimsy promise we made to each other but only you made it to the dawn while i shattered in the sun

wouldn’t you like to break me, she said and fingered her fishnets.
no, he said, i wouldn’t like that at all.
but, she slid a finger to the corner of her mouth, aren’t i pretty enough to break?
no, he said, you’re too pretty.
c’mon, she said and leaned forward pulling at her collar, wouldn’t it fun? you look like you’d be fun to break.
who’s breaking who?
why we’ve been breaking you all along my dear. she sat on his lap, now beg.

cracked sideways like a lover crossed and molested, having been turned inside and out into streets where the stone curbs are ragged from the teeth. she felt me up, rubbed my back in circular ways that made me embarrassed and yet hard for her. stockings that covered naked pubis, breasts smooth and soft and wasted, hands that were always tired from lying. i was just another in a series of nooses, a line of victims turned perpetrators, flaccid cocks marred with her lipstick.

sometimes we’d go off on these mad riffs of misadventure and knowledge because, well sometimes you just need to unknow, you know, you need to figure out what you don’t know and that can be anything, like music or art or how a dishwasher works or what happens when you fuck sideways with a gag in your mouth, you just gotta know what you don’t know and it can go on for hours or days and nights, as long as it doesn’t go on for weeks because then you’re really fucking yourself up, you know, you’re completely lost, you don’t know not one fucking thing worth knowing because you don’t know everything, how can you know what you know without knowing what you don’t know, and you see, if it goes on like this for too long you just go ape shit, you just go fucking wild or catatonic or throw up because at some point you gotta know something, you gotta know which way is up at least, you gotta know your fucking name.

and i beget thee
everything you have
forgotten, every dream
you blew away, every sorrow
you made, until you are
as the dust and the ash and the cinder
left in the wake of a once great
but extinguished flame