In the mountains tonight
someone is trailing upwards
towards the cross that
they fenced off from the people—
carved bones intersecting
into something less holy
than an idling car in a closed garage
but more than the ladies
in their Pussycat glamour
walking down Colfax
until the sun sits up again.
Once we tried for resurrection—
coupled our insides with the air
& tied them off in the atmosphere
like lead filled balloons
that never forgot how to fly.
Once we ripped ourselves clean—
found snakes dangling
between our legs
& halos of rust around our joints
that we peeled off as easily
as yarn dolls pulling into one
lon
Kiss your temple—
I am lost at friends
but this is where
I have come to worship,
where the air smells
of pines & rocky starts.
I’m not sure when
ordinary lives
become extra
but somehow I cannot
help but believe
it begins with a kiss
that starts a marathon
or in the forms
of a few lines
chasing the light
across a dim room
where I’ve seen you sleep—
soundless & unwavering.
That’s a half-truth—
the sleeplessness
that you’ve brought me
is the greatest gift
& the greatest fight
in the history of romance.
That you keep your eyes
focused on my prints
deep into midnight—
curling yourself
There are bird skulls
in the tiles
& a death is watching me
from the tree outside—
two harvest moon eyes
staring into mine
& blowing them out
into burnt sockets.
The dark is heavy as wool—
turned up to the necks
of all the hanged men
who didn’t listen to
the warnings in the sky.
For three nights
a hooting has
shattered my ears
& ruffled my feathers—
there is no escape
from ancestral growth,
each leaf falls silently
as a wasted life.
It was that morning
when housekeeping
found us—
your shirt attached
like a leech
to the lampshade,
the beds spaced out
like trenches
with my skirt
lying defeated
between them
& your fingers
deep in my mind.
The shock of seeing
the white flag
of my face
as you burrowed
into my brainstem
& left behind fingerprints
like sleeper cells—
she dropped the vacuum
with a canon blast
& her eyes became
twin flash bulbs.
There was nothing
except the fallout
from my intellectual
radiation poisoning
& her injured whimpers
until your chuckle
filled the room—
the mumbles that
lit my spine
in the dark
made grotesque
in the bli
We stroll at night and there is the cobalt blue breeze on our defiant arms
we are fading to midnight while fireflies die, blinking out
with the heat and the water bleeding from the morning-after air
smelting.
your loquaciousness
a swelling of words an ebb a flow
a purification, in my silence, a melting of my ore-world
into a solid solitary spiraling element:
pair of dirty stumbling sockfeet picking their way
across the dewgrass and your body is singing.
You burn in this ashdark like molten gold.
I will douse all my flaws
in your lion's perfection
and I will mold us both
into one useless lump of flawless metal
we will be w