sometimes he wants to stop, he cannot stop. an avalanche, pebbles that become insurmountable. she puts on bubblegum lipstick, looks in the mirror, cannot forget the rasp of his laughter. he pulls on his teeth, we trace the gumline. and here it was, and here it was, and here it was. all blush, caked, two shades lighter than dirt. to forgive, we’ve forgotten everything. a glass of water by the windowsill, evaporated by the sun, leaving nothing.

he is tired, exhausted. i change his name. he grows roots from his palms, he kneels and buries his wrists into the ground. from his ears, flowers, white to pink with deep blue stems. it breaks him. you can smell years of rooms with broken bottles and stubbed out cigarettes. you mourn for him and he cries, i am still so tired, so tired. and rocks split beneath him and milk pours out of his mouth. the mud turns to sand and she cannot escape. he tries, but she cannot escape. she tries and he cannot stop weeping. we all try and we feel exhausted. she opens her mouth and we find petals falling from our fingers.

you make a world like this. you breathe, you open your eyes, you reach out. into the void, grasp onto to something, anything, make it what you will. it begins with desire and pain. a longing for to heal, to cross the rift between her and there. you might never arrive, but you need to leave to get anywhere.

chicksaw and rapture, a divine tuning of the senses, of taste, of hearing, of touch: all the things you cannot see, that she cannot see, that he cannot imagine. a wind howls through me, leaves my mouth gaping open until the lips stretch over the teeth and the tongue dries. unbelievable, like christ traveling across the world while his body rots in a cave. men dig my neighbor’s yard, they pull thick yellow cables under and through the ground raising the amperage, more pulses for the dead heart of this town. sitting beside me she says while fingering the splinters of the bench on our porch, did you ever expect this, did you ever dream? choking i reply, i stopped dreaming the minute he died.

as she fingers the roots shot through her ribs, she wonders if it was a question of need or circumstance, the dying of petals, the swallowing of over-ripened seeds. and from her belly sprung out mischievous cattle that ate upwards the soot and mulch breaking a surface into the sun. beside her grave, he runs his hand over winter hardened grass and pricks his fingers with the memory.

i can’t speak it, a shudder in the chest, fingers climbing out from the throat. a gasping, scratching. the things that should not be said, the things i never say, the torture of this skin, the haunting i feel in the night. a longing for entropy, for oblivion.
even this boy, he tells me in the dark, even this is a choice.

hand me downs, rusty spoon, frayed blanket, a pair of jeans worn thin. i walk around and through sidewalks cracked upward, uneven streets tarred over countless times. patchwork. in the distance, the city beckons, nostalgia. never lonely only alone in a city of millions. and a comfort in that, a dire comfort for restless bones and weathered skin.

Life’s a bitch, but God forbid if the bitch divorce me -Nas, Affirmative Action
and so here we go out the door and onto the avenues, the boulevards, the mad yawning streets. here we go again with much trespass, armed and willing, kicking open the mouths of strangers full of remorse and stealing their tongues. it could always be better than this, we could make it better than this and we laugh hysterically because we’ve run out of liquor and our knuckles bruised from punching the bricks. and he says to me, wiping the spit with his sleeve, he says, i wouldn’t give this up for anything.

when i was your age we did not have telephones that fit into our pockets, we talked to one another and looked at our friends faces when we spoke and saw how our words rattled around in their heads and came back out in differing tones and pitch and in turn we were rattled into laughing or crying or into incredible acts of violence or love until someone spoke again.