It has been like a needle,
probing crevices between my bones -
the kind I never knew existed,
divulging emotion and secrets
(foreign objects that poison the
bloodstream) with opprobrious
surgical precision.

It has been the haunting doctor,
assuring me my heart still exists:
it beats in my chest, visible
through that lurid mess of
torn flesh and bone.

Why are you still staring?
Why are you still listening to it beat?

Forever is my shattering friend;
it breaks off pieces of my body,
trying to get at my soul.

But I am
a soul,
I don’t
have one.

I am Forever’s sea-glass;
Forever is brackish water
selling me to the shore, shoving
salt in my wounds, breaking me further.

I discover worlds as I look
into your ashen eyes rimmed
charcoal grey, mottled and marbled
yellow.

I discover beauty in the most
prosaic colors:
your yellow-gray moons.

Perhaps that is the only concrete thing
I would miss if forever decided to claim us.
It would be looking into your eyes,
not only to see your essence in them,

just you,

but to be able to touch them,
because as immortals,
we are intangible.

She used to rip the stars out of the night sky with her magic fingers, dipping her hands into these hot, waxy glowing spherical entities that wandered in the black dome above her head. She was worse than Atlas when she cut them out; she was worse than a murderer.
Look at this, She whispered gently, holding it like a dove in her hands.
I was this star,
a comet she stole from the sky, and labeled as her own.
I was only a ghost attempting to proclaim my light as I danced and dipped through the heights and depths of this inky black dome that hung domineeringly over her head.

She loved the darkness too much.
She wished she could abandon the earth and simultaneously not be reminded that she, in her old mind, felt she could not survive without a body.

You are the morning dew
that is bone-chillingly cold,
soaking my feet like the overused
dishrags that haunt restaurants.

It is a kind of water I can get used to,
unlike the numbing cold of your touch
in my dreams. It plasters fallen petals
onto my toes as they are dragged tirelessly
through the tall grass, and I am reminded of
your first bouquet of flowers that sat
gaudily on your hospital nightstand.

Just pictures, you whispered. They’re
the better ones. They don’t die, and their
beauty and color last forever.
This is why I love you, because you think
photographs are immortal entities.

You are the cherry blossom tree
in our yard, solidly rooted and alive
with birds cocky enough to boast
at this early hour. The air smells
so beautiful, and all I can do is cry.

it would have to tell you that I’m enchanted,
that I was the one - drunk with love-sickness -
that painted the stars into the ink-black sky,
and tore out the moon so that it bled,
a deep, red hole in the heavens.

It would have to tell you that inside
the cavity of my chest where my heart
tried to beat is this moon torn from the sky,
prominent yet withered:
an ethereal display of emotion
screaming in my veins,
and flashing signals with the stars.

Once upon a time it would have told you, if you’d asked,
that there was no way into this moon of my heart:
it waned and waxed and disappeared altogether.

You can only tear it out.

stolid (4 am rain)

this is what the rain says -
these thicknesses of air
come down -
this is what it says
(___________
__________)

the rain is
nothing
it is not some celestial being
calling me from the grave
20 years prior

this
is what the rain says
(_____________
_____________)


I can burn and the rain
doesn’t care, it does not pulse;
a screaming copy-silence

that is what the rain says.
that even with my body absent where
my spirit lives in this semi-conscious world

of nightmares, and memories and where time
is never halted; where people still live and breathe
I am this ambiguously frayed anomalous form

of abstract thought, remembered actions and
feeling that never dies.

this
is what the rain says
(____________
_____________)
these thicknesses of air
come down, melting through me,
letting me know that this feeling



















never dies, just because my body has.

It is a separate peace, truth is, and separate pieces. It is the definition of thought, or ethics - of ‘aggressively poor’ postures and the like. It is your reality, my reality and everyone’s reality. It is truly an elegiac comedy.
How can both play at that? I have no idea, but it’s rather intriguing.
But, I have a question.
Do you fear oblivion?
Do you fear oblivion like “a blind man fears the dark...too soon...laughing”? It is one thing to fear it, and another thing to fear it too soon, like a blind man does, laughing.
Edward Hirsch wrote:
Always, [sleepwalkers] return home safely,
like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.
And always they wake up as themselves again.
That's why I want to say something astonishing
like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.

But.
Is a blind man caught in oblivion? And even so, with that, is darkness a form of oblivion?
And oblivion, to a blind man - would it be called merciful if it indeed let him go?
Or, do you just simply fear oblivion? Because I, my friend, do not.
In fact, I wish for it some nights. But what I am afraid of, is not returning from oblivion.
And then, well, I muse over that. I think of the purple spaces between memory and photographs, and if anything could ever be destroyed after it leaves this world.
I end up not caring. I am not angry, sad or disconcerted. I simply just don’t care over the idea.
There are a thousand worlds outside of our own that exist without thought to keep them alive. They exist without most of us having to believe in them, or without us having to give it any thought at all.
Perhaps, that is the true meaning of liberation.

I keep trying to remember you - your knees and your blue fingertips: the solid formation of muscles and bones, and the blood pulsing through arteries in your neck. You were so alive.
I keep trying.
Your face had suddenly folded, and when the creases deepened into pain, I finally asked you.
This is where I close my eyes, and try.
I will keep trying.

Where are you going? I ask.
Your shoulders hunch over, and your spine curls against the couch. Your hands clasp around your elbows, and your knuckles turn white when the air starts ripping. Sheltering fatigue and perplexity, you shake.
I’m gasping.
Your lips part - those red, thin lips. Centuries go by, only to span the length of a second, and yet I hear muddled, incoherent, urgently convoluted whispers.
The gears spin inside your head figuring whether to cry or speak, or scream.
I’m trying, but it’s like looking without seeing.
The air suddenly becomes alive with silence that in a sense it is so deafening that my ears are bleeding.
The cacophony begins and yet the sound is not enough. Slightly alarming in its austerity, a sob does not escape the envelope of your lips, rather they quiver with ethereal violence and then a pallid light is suddenly garnered like a shaft in your ribcage, exploding into russet grace and burning a dark hole into the earth (pandemonium).

My fists are tight.
I am trying.

Stop. You have to stop.

I reach for you - pulling you close, my hands and fingers splaying across the bones where wings would blossom had you been born an angel. But, you collapse into a puddle of red and clothes, running into tears down to the serrated ground.
We’re on your deck, and instead of feeling the wood, which you said once, was the definition of home in your bones, you dive off the balcony, into the ocean. The railing kisses my fingers now, and gives me splinters.

You dove into the ocean.
I squeeze my eyes shut, until light and the faint red behind my eyelids announce how painfully they are shut, and how I cannot escape this reality.
I am trying.
The last thing that you feel is the pulse in your fingers, dissolving to nothing as you let the water travel through them. The last thing you see is the sun; as your face slips away so does the thread of heaven that you grasp: that silent unrequited prayer.

There is no sense in trying.
Your body has dissolved. With your quivering lips you have stolen my light, and you left me without anything to say.
Perhaps that is what you wanted.
Now, you live as the water.

and winter streak the glass.
The trees are sharp and staccato
against the sky melting blue-gray-white,
separated like cotton - pulled apart as if by a child.
Winter tears dirty the window;
they mask over the haggard cement sidewalk.
From above, I am like a bird,
solid not on a tree but these
gray-blue tiles that make up the
floor-plan of the heavens.
Those windows - they’re frames.
The people missing me - they look
through them - through their own
wintertainted glass: their hands busy,
minds absent.
Becoming
instead of just
being,
the mechanics of the body
make them ignorant.

When I am no longer living,
I will still exist, but these ghosts
will just be muscles
that I yearn for,

and skin, fabric and clothes.
In this place I am higher - above my qualms,
and I (see - feel - want - wish)
I could feel the heart pulsing
through veins: the heat and sweat,
my hair matted to my forehead.

They are clocks against a polished floor:
hands and legs spinning, running away
with time uncreated.
(and I see - feel - want - wish)
to block that chasm of thought
with that loud, raucous white noise:
that is music (I can hear
without ears)

nearly as intense as a heartbeat
ready to burst through the cavity
it’s held prison in, cased up in that box
called a chest.

Music, like life, vibrates through me,
more intense than the effects
a body losing its spirit,
has on its heart.