blanketings

when 2am comes around now, there’s no bottle neck nestled in my clammy hands pleasantly buzzed at the sight of you, seated at someone else’s kitchen table the purgatory between foolish frailty and unlovable, suffocating mass is now shore and sea there’s no more walking home alone when daylight savings ends, numb, knowing the thermostat has gone up behind me i drive over the bridge at sunset: i crank the defroster, i drool onto his pillow and i don’t remember the last time we talked and i don’t wonder if i care because he’s him: as absolute as the ink impressions tattooing all my notebooks and you are you, a desert so indecipherable even i quit reading grains because i’m under these warm impossible weights: a humerus nuzzled into my ribcage a snoring snout claiming my thigh as her pillow a crocheted blanket whose seams are coming undone and whose stitches stretched toward the light of a burnt out hallway bulb because he lets me stay, wants me to stay even when i’m

drywall graveyards tacks stabbed through ghosts buried and legible and moss-bearing you never leave flowers but you still remember; will even with creasing palms of papercuts and old printer ink in a lot of ways you're still sliding across main street graphite-stained and bleary surrounded by cymbals and freezing condensation and pinpricks in your fingers in a lot of ways you're still feeding her clementines, her veins bic-blue and eyes alight near clear with spirits realer than you in every way you're crumpled and jagged on the floor the swaying kitchen table you're talking to a fragment, a figment handing you bottles to burn your tongue and your throat and wait for what? for your self-portrait to dry once and for all; for footsteps echoing down the stairs; for long-decayed maple helicopters to activate; for all the dears to fall behind your bed and stay there

i get lost on purpose drive into the mountains like maybe i’m waiting for a cliff like maybe route 44 will go off the grid unmap itself from my neurons and from google both i brake disgusted reminded of the guy who took the hairpin too fast and didn’t even make a dent in the ridge reminded how it looms so large with every rev till all i see is rock , road , and impossibly the flightiest glimpse of vanishing point and it reminds me that i can never become the ridge not as much as that guy who escaped the sky i pull over next to smoking trucks and their smoking drivers silhouetted against a valley so vast it may as well be nothing a pipedream projected somewhere beyond some etching from the silurian period that i won’t understand (not even when i’m older) i’m sorry i’m late i get lost on purpose but i still repeat myself: the second the county signs change color i’m shivering at the lookout i'm swinging around and glancing nervously at the sun i'm

you’re not a poem and that’s why i love you i used to write about the moon hanging shadows on and around my neck the cacti shriveling blisters in death valley imaginary summer superstorms and neurotransmitters pulses and a lack thereof i thought about punctuation and the ghosts i’d talk to in circles sepia-stained i painted over them in ugly neons and called it art (as if my wrists were art once upon lines and edges) and i wouldn’t rest until they danced sparks against the tips of my fingers like shocks against warm sheets in winter as i wrapped myself up invisible and silent you make language lost now my saccades pivot only to the blank spaces between your words and your eyes and the cool komorebi(those leaves bordering the sky of ghosts i disappeared so impossibly easily) after you leave i sit and let my hands go numb, let my hands melt the iced latte you bought me when my throat was shut and shivering when i was quiet and charred and gaping at the window and still

i. must be nice being a live-in crypt-keeper lounging on stones till they fall over keeping the grass warm for ‘em ii. i sip my juice glass of box wine (it’s been six months oh god); i make eye contact with the deer, freezing: a woman feeds them breadcrumbs from her car around noon and they all saunter over: gods examining their offerings on an altar in the mausoleum parking lot. when the sun sets, they approach loose dirt and chew on the marigolds some suckers planted in fits of poetic reverent irony and i watch them(and i know they hate the taste or i bite my cheek and know they’re supposed to) iii. i always wanted to live in a crypt: stained glass concrete windows and all the kids wondering what might be inside like the doors to dracula’s castle too distant for fists to reach no wi-fi no hi-byes no glowing screens or angry yellow eyes through dusty curtains(that have the grace and decency to close so i’m alone) and no need to save my neighbors’ numbers or pretend the

the way the wind rises and parts your hair it changes me, the way we touch by meeting eyes it eats up and inflates me at the same time it hollows me out and i feel ready to burst into a shower of petals and stones at the same time but then again there is the silence of mountains and i feel each rock, the weight accumulating the things i am not allowed to say, they are mountainous they fill every crevice and every edge and the shadows stop me from vomiting words they twist like a noose and in the dimming light i see the flames burn in full clarity as i wait for the full century to crash upon my shoulders if i don't speak the words will fester and if i do they will strike me dead like a viper i will burn like the morning star but there are no paths in this world that demands such a sacrifice before i am ash and dust i am living and my friend touches my hand, and says don't burn, don't pen it down, if it hurts you don't tell your story

when a bad habit turns into a bad routine and the bad days snowball into bad years the blood seeping out from fresh wounds, do they stare back at me dare you take a step backwards, make it your best step rearrange your actions according to theories of dead men i think the words speak to me, echoing past pages the road we treaded are by far the most correct apply a bandaid, then, and hope for the best for hope is the only thing we have to ward off the sadness pain and deep disgust

i want to recognize it when i see it. have i seen it ? or have all these words been smoke disappearing into wind like promises believed on new year’s day ? and if i were not so made of stories, could i cut the new tongues out and keep only ancient parts of me to speak the earth, the tides? and if i were not so made for stories, would i still be writing out our endings til i find the one that fits like a detective hunting clues to solve a crime? . i once thought that there was poetry between us, the woven word our own uniting god. and always always has an asterisk, i always understood that but but the blades into the tapestry-- that part was a surprise.

I was attuned to a crystal sweaty with light I was moved like a painting messy in life I was cooed like a child I was cooed But food didn’t come come easy I’m built maybe without a belly — like a hunger — for victory or my survival I was sour like a quiet body, rumbling, whining An acid I am an acid Food doesn’t come easy I was anew like a miserable memory in flight I was fine like maintaining fits to the eyes I was lowered like a child Lowered The moods do not come easy I’m built with a perfect sturdiness, earning the furtherover reservoir water killing holes on my face I was fountains like youth using donations to eat I was conditions Conditional child Contentional love Complicit damwork Sand falling through neurodivergent-long-lingers Assumptive brushfalls An unfocused prism Lepid, transitory Orrerous, but unconditionally trajectionless, Lured above the fumy waves Cooed like a smile, tricked out of a mouthlike reflux Going younger, younger. Spiraling Celestine Stoning

leaden, all souls sift proper through parable teeth; i asked you to leave your key. you’re keeping the loved letters, ink down the cheek chafing, cut through the lesser, the left. reap so sweetly now, elbow jabbed in the maw of a greed we discovered; i begged it on knees to recede. it seems we’re eschewed as can be.

span of an evening, hour after our de- miserly flaws flailed, towering, towering, to- morrow we may ash; if asked we lapse, if aspiration could borrow from the past, perhaps. yet,

so homesick but never wanting feet to touch ground, feel ground, are you grounded? are you surrounded by your best friend’s arms and your sister’s laughter or are you stuck in your brain between neurons, chaotic synapse junctions, encounters whizzing by so fast they spin you around and around and around, you’re never sure, so you stay still always searching forever waiting to be found

too clever by half caught a buzz and bought into the kayfabe and tonight you’ve got those nice samsara eyes a statistical powder keg ready to rend the soft and un- suspecting flesh of any wanton beast that crosses your path so can i be the next to hang your sword above my head, to barely crawl out of your hex before being syphoned through again and when you’ve had your fill of me i dream you’ll spread my ineffable remains like a widow - through the atmosphere and all across the alluvial plain

i never thought much about fate until you looked back at the mess and i contemplated to forget or to burn bridges, break it all off it took a second to know you and in my mind you were a child composed of fog and wonder not fully human not truly there i never really thought much about your presence of how you lived and spent your days because what you do is incredible but still no more a figment of ? me surrendering to the actuality of you as a midnight wake up call words fail me repeatedly as i break

i am rising like magma, ancient yet at the same time brand-new i can't believe that i was still here, all along - i am tapping on my keyboard once again, yearning to dust off nylon strings and burn through the skin on my fingertips, warm my vocal chords, dip a paint brush into the brightest orange you've ever seen and let decade-old soundwaves bless my ears i'll believe that dormancy isn't in my nature but i am awakening, i am stretching out my molten limbs, and i cannot wait to taste the ash