rustling out of the brush of trees that grow along the side of houses and take root beneath the foundation and raise the edge until the walls crack and my fingers fit between the frame and the beam and she yawns listlessly and sleepy as i break my back with the struggle with pushing it all back in and i cannot put it all back in, and she says, why don’t you throw your back into it, and i laugh this hoarse whisper cursing your name and everything that came with it when you gave it to me

i need you to need me to touch me to push me to dig your fingers into my hair and yank me to your neck i need you to push me to pull me to make me feel alive to make me feel i am there i am here that i mean something to you that you need me too that you need this silly flesh that you need me and only me to make me feel as if i am seen as if i am real i need you to remind me why i am alive

we wait. we wait by supermarket checkout stands and convenience store lottery lines. we wait, itching, reading fake headlines and rabid text juxtaposed by sultry flesh, to move, to get out. we’re been stuck for so long in airline seats too narrow, between angry couples and air nozzles set directly at our foreheads. we would peel the foreskin if it would move the world. we would crack our forearms into ridiculous angles until the jagged end pierced outward, if only you would be quiet enough to listen.

there is a certain kind of longing in death, it is absolute and irresponsible. it is careless to pine for someone who is dead. dead to the world, he writes, i have missed you for so long and it is impossible to continue. he stops. you cannot forgive, he cannot forgive you. he cannot forgive the fact that you have forgotten and i stand idle by deeply dug graves and mounds of freshly wet earth. it is not the dead that we mourn or long for. we are rather compelled by the impossible distance between us, we are drawn by the void. it is the absence of hope, the absence of longing, the absence of despair that we find beautiful. he writes, the look of death in your eyes when you had looked at me for the first time after such a very long time was startling and precious and i knew right then you were never to be mine again. you cannot forget him and he mocks you.

“…but the only thing I ever really wanted to say was wrong, was wrong, was wrong.” The Sundays, “Here’s where the story ends”
always the wrong thing at the wrong time. timing issues. misfiring spark plug. an engine horribly out of tune, out of sorts. i’ve done all this sorting through my life only to find it is all a mess. i have no idea where anything is or how it got there. but we got there. we are there. some where in the thick of this. thick fingered, i spread my hands wide. sheafs and sheafs. right beside me and i miss you constantly, like a bone fracture that hasn’t healed quite right during the rain.

a certain ravenous hunger like life. a growl that reminds you. the heat presses on you, impresses you, weakens you, breaks you.

“…To confess, Yes, I remember. Perhaps to even have a voice, to murmur, Yes, I remember. What an addition to company that would be!”
-Samuel Beckett, Company
the memory and the voice, to have said it even before. stop at this. leave it at that. unending, the perambulations, the native knowing, in the dark. glistening, out of sweat, out of our minds. not ours, one. i lost you so long ago that even the echo was deceptive, welcomed, a break in a certain monotony of despair. even that has it’s limits. stop, it can only go so far before you are back nipping at your own heels again.

husky, she said, you’re quite husky and grabbed a handful of his belly.
he squirmed like a girl and loved every minute of it.
she pinched his nose, no laughing, this isn’t funny.
and he sat very still and look at her very straight and breathed very slowly.
better, she said, much better. and grabbed some more of him.
and he suddenly slapped her and she fell to the ground and he laughed.
you forget your place, he said and knelt down, you forget who’s paying.
wiping the blood from her lip and onto his belly, she smiled, you’re so husky.

it’s the night that makes you brim with it, from the mouth, no the chest, something broken and steely there, something with edges. you were never the girl, you were never the boy, only a dog sniffing by the pond for the scent of some fucking that was beyond you, lithe lovers skinny dipping and now drowned. you were always only the dog, nose in the dirt, choking on the wet grass, without an owner, without a home, hungry.

near hysterical poker dreaming forcing the hand instead of just living it because i knew if i just let go i knew if i let the random into play because i love the random i would lose it all i would be disappointed and broken and broke and i wanted a win more than anything else i wanted to come out on top to wipe out all this debt behind me so i thought and i thought and never let my mind stray from the particular hand of three hand poker even though i was waking even though i had already looked at the clock a thousand times this morning i kept going back to it and wouldn’t let the deck beat me but by the time everyone saw the hand i had and knew i got it in pretty good i couldn’t sleep anymore and the dream was done and i was awake and the hand was gone.