i breathe fountains of lost time, of roadside gravel and the skirts of streets made dirty with snow. we believed this, we all saw it coming. subways that hammer tunnels and whip us into a frenzy. bars with bouncers staving off the tide of drunken children. wide and open dark parks where trees yearn to escape the skyline brick. she held my hand and whispered into my ear, take me home, take me to where your heart is.
Category Archives: words
short stop
scratch like this, break this, fawning head over heels, beg likes this, spoon me like this, dig the nails into his ass, gripping, how gripping, sweat like this, moan like this, saddle me like this, kiss me like this, kiss me like this, leave me this, leave this, forget this, break this, miss this, hands on knees coughing.
by the gumline
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.
petal kneel
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.
winning ticket
so he scratches at the dream for the dream the way sick men do their lesions to get the blood out to get the poison out he scratches feverishly to escape what he has built to bring himself and them and all that he loves into a better place better than what he is made of but all he finds all he is left with after he’s taken the last set of crumpled one dollar bills out his pocket is colorful pieces of perforated cards promising nothing other than the scratching itself
abandon
the night, the night. it beckons me, promises me anonymity, a safe haven to forget everything, to disappear. she asks, is it really that easy to leave us, to leave all of us behind? i pull from my cigarette and sadly smile, that’s why i’m still here. and to speak it makes me dust, to breathe it reveals i was never the man she thought i was. i was never half a man at all.
make a world like this
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.
she has endured
she says to me, i’m afraid that you might be faking it.
and i feel tendrils snake out from under my ribs and clench around my neck and smother my mouth until i choke and a current shoots through my spine and i secretly pray that one day i suffer like she has, that I whip myself into the same torment she has endured.
i now am, am now
i can do this, i ‘ve done this a million times, in a million different lives. night air crisp, walking through the canyon streets, she asks, have you killed yourself before? and i lie, i lie holding her hand, i lie as i put a wrinkled dollar into the hat of the jazzman playing on the corner. i lie as we turn corners and watch beggars sift through the city’s garbage, so clean of life, of anything edible. i lie down in the morning and feel the sun etch angry fingers across my face. our daughter leaps into bed while my son cries from another room, cradle stranded. she asks, fingering open my red red eyes, are you alive daddy? reaching for the curve of my wife’s hip, i now am. i am now.
mundanity
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.