inside my bones are dry you waited for much too long. have a seat at my table, have a seat. baby you give me good deja vu. I can show this, from under the ground I rise... you say that you can't let your skin cover your whole body until I place my hands upon it. you and I can wait for the streets to turn yellow in the light. it's just the days they turn into months when I keep you from any disease that may swarm from the tone of my voice when I swear that I'm not begging. I swear your favorite color last week was the white of the bones that rattle within you, the way you are scared to fall when the days they turn into months. (I waited for what you had to say next and you waited for me to tell you everything. we fell asleep like that, like emotions under oceans and we didn't say a word. we didn't say a word. we fell asleep like ghosts and the next thing that we said was "Good morning" at the same time.) I pick up my blocks, down low everybody's a soul then I go out there in a field of snow. From under the ground I rise... when you close your eyes you are lways grateful to open them again. remember this. everything we have is everything we need and everything we give should be everything we want. we love in the corners of ballrooms and through our raincoats and off of our blessings in having nothing to say, sometimes because there was never any intention of living this way it's only in the summer that you get this way (the days, the days). it's just these days, they turn into months. These days, they turn into monsters in one great cage. I can see everything, just not in this lighting. Circles bring us back to the same places in different ways. the sound through cold phones and the views on colder mornings when we see ourselves for who we are, though we may be standing up too straight. it's probably a miracle, the odds of us being born for the sake of this moment. then will be now once you realize it.

I left the book out in the rain overnight. it fell out of my coat when I was spinning in circles in the only real heavy warm summer storm in the city. so much beauty. pages are turning. you don't even know my birthday. I was spinning so more drops could touch my skin. i'm effervescent and reckless and rarely stay in the same place for very long. it just stated raining again, but harder. the front door is locked. the puddles keep looking at me. I am hungry for things that I can't eat. the pages were lost before we had written anything. the past used to be something I could deny if I didn't like it, but now I have dreams about everything. talking about talking about dreams about talking. I forgot that time is something that wont stop not-stopping. she says that she's never been into art and I still sleep with her, inhaling the shininess. I have the greatest view of my life.

some of the longest parties start to seem real lonely by the end of them wanting to not want, wanting to be wanted seeing ourselves with the wonder of living myths it's an invocation, not a ballad centeredness of self, not self-centeredness it knocked me loose all of these new dreams about the day after instead of the day before so many far-fetched connections each one passing like a modest lottery a falling star, afresh, unnoticed everything is counting down at me twinkling, nauseating, alive why have I believed that I needed so much, so badly? I would rather be less realistic and more reality the death before the change spirit smoke with a brilliant life of its own under-blood, a round door, and the sound of no voice the sun was glowing just as much on the inside of me as it was on the outside I synced my breathing with hers for a minute so that we were dying at the same speed what we've done to each other is just basic lover-hunter instinct, simple atrocities this self-perpetuating search for assurance we survive off of making ourselves believe only a minor loss of hearing that's all that she is to me wanting to not want wanting to be wanted

there are children so young that their mothers haven't been born yet. every invisible part of me bounces back and forth inside of my body. I see these collisions from insightful distances even when i'm a part of them. they're all accidents that I wish I had done on purpose. and it's been a long time since I've been so drunk that I heard music in a silent room. I strangle my insides, ringing them out until they're see-through. what would that say about me if this song was actually about you? when the earth cries, her tears come out all over body, and when the sun cries it gives them back into her. all this crying, it's just laughter. get away from the places that are easy to stay in. get weightless, go where the wind sweeps you. take your life apart, then clean every piece. let a little light on them. the spaces need to breathe. then put it back together and tell me what you see. maybe it's the medicine or it's the itchy synapses, but if we were made for something, then this is what that is.

too bad it's not a joke that I get proud of myself when I don't talk in codes. our baby teeth could be in a landfill somewhere and caring can be a mouse trap in a meadow, some kind of anchor or cage. this is how we forget our own names. quicksand lilies, illusionists with soft lips. if we were better to each other then none of this would be like it is. I want to be like a glass of water: both the container and the contents are transparent, all ideal and no dealing with the consequences. I want to be like glass, like water. in mexico, they say that you have three deaths: - the moment you understand that your life will definitely end someday. - the moment that your life story stops and you stop breathing. - and the moment long after you're gone when someone says your name for the last time. no one will know that it is happening when it is. it will be unwitnessed and undocumented, so precious, so lost, hidden deep in time, making me think that we really are just spirits. I want to be like glass, like water: contained and content.

I had to funnel the oxygen through my lips because of the condition that my last lover left them in after her last kiss. just before she disappeared, she said, "sleep it off, kid. love will come looking for you in the morning." so I did my best, survived my own nightmares and daydreamed through the years until I met you and found a new kind of like-minded centeredness in every moment together as every moment is only just now beginning to exist. now if I was someone better, I might tell you all about how I could and rather would listen to you laughing at our shynesses sinking into their silences as the sky is picking fights with the trees. (( a dark part starts glowing )) I know that it's only in the winter that we get this way, but when we meet in the middle of wet streets, we don't have to speak of how we want to burn ourselves to the ground with our life stories. so I have been practicing centering myself patiently in the center of thousands of versions of everything overlapping us like our lives and days and dreams, reminding me of leaves floating down warm streams brushing past baptisms. I know how much of wanting love is just my own imagination. I also know how much of having is is boomeranging grace, the absence of absence, past magic coming back to play, more than believing that moments hardly even exist and neither do we. I want to hug you for so long that all of the color electrifies around us and starts fucking up other people's equilibrium. I want to get you just drunk enough and tell you things that I would never say out loud if either of us were fully sober, or, only if both of us were fully asleep. So go ahead, spread this open, de-crease me, out-lay me, love me at my center and let me spread you out from yours. It’s no secret that our hearts have enough to spare, so give me your inner outer space. and let us not remember our own faces when we do a single one of any of these things, discovering these rivers of love from inside-out even though we've still got entire histories at our heels of questionable questioning mixing up our various scare tactics in eye contact and trial-and-error therapy. love me like I am anything that you have ever wanted from this, any of it. you and me–– everything and nothing touching without touching laughing so hard that we can't remember the last time we felt this lucky.

if I had to guess i'd probably bet that on my life's timeline i'm closer to my birth than to my death. at the end of the day is each year just a box of old pictures and letters? familiar bending heart, dainty contortionist between my teeth, and a hundred memories that I don't deserve anymore. I am somebody else by now and I can't help it. I've been doing my best to not approach anything any faster or slower than it approaches me. but my blood isn't just one color. it is some kind of sharp water, the byproduct of hearts touching. since I could be anybody, my strategy has been to act like everyone I will ever love all rolled into one. it's a magician's trick, just something that I kinda do all the time. and who knows what the migratory patterns of my mind would look like if I mapped them out right. most of what seems so circular is more of an elliptical orbit. I can see in the dark, a creature of habit, answerless, abstracted. the dragonflies come by my hair to visit. everything rushes through me in cold blood. and i'm guilty of throwing the word "love" around because that's what it does to me. solstices of self, like the muscles of trees. and even though it makes me sad, i'm not afraid of the world ending. this disappearing list of what matters starched and prosaic a sudden overheating starry-like, swimming in ice dizzy in the dark, nonchalant and weightless vanished like burned newspaper. lots fits in tiny spots like a hundred-dollar bill hiding in a book. and I can't pick out what i'm looking for in it, making myself from stray parts, settling slices, a collection of twigs, fog in the corners of my eyes. this eminent reverence that i'm getting used to is a stone I swallow in the strangest moods when I feel as though the time I've got is gonna run out soon, on it's last stretch. and I have no idea how this works. I have no idea how precious it is.

put me back where you found me or take me somewhere better. a girl is made of bright colors. she gets between my thoughts until my thoughts are of her getting between them. that's the good thing about mirages. they stay away from taking strange things at a glacial pace. you can get caught in a crazy intersection of wavelengths. and I kissed her thinking about how someday i'm gonna stop thinking. when we understand that the glass of water that we love is already broken, every moment with it becomes so precious. put me back where you found me or take me somewhere better. those who have harmed me are like a precious treasure. let's get stoned and turn the music up loud on a secret long drive with the windows down, invisible on the big highway. the words turn into colors when they set in and start to shake. it's not the soreness in my forehead. it's the engravings in my feet. "chew these flowers but don't swallow them." do you remember the music that we built our love from? we were loud-mouther romantics who were happy with a house of branches broken off of trees that had just started growing. the saplings were wrapped in piano strings, a heart buried while it was still beating. the heedless seed of a tree that's still dreaming, the roots can hear the leaves think. there's a certain kind of person that the birds will go to to feel safe. I am looking for these people, wandering towards my shaman, charmed with my fantasies of where the coming day will take me and what it will be like once i'm there, standing in crystal-consciousness, the lightless light. I mean, you never know who is thinking about you right now. after that, she comes. the sweet nurse of nature hanging before me and i'm squinting into the sun at a wall of flowers.

take your coat off. I know it's cold, but let's get cozy. someone wants you, someone wants me. I spend my time so much better than my money. remember when we thought that killing ourselves was cool? wandering hands in the dark, the sadness of not knowing who you are, this and that, a mixed war of infinite doors for sure. her lying lips were true blue when we kissed. I wrote this to test how well my tools work and then how well I can use them. I can't help who I dream about. let me live my life the way I want to. i'll figure out what to do with it. I don't care who is in whose bed. all the people looking at the lights in the city, they are lights, too. and nobody thinks about you as much as you do. what's your favorite way to exist? adaptive rigorous rivulets, my good attitude behind the shadows of my baddest habits. and why would it matter who you know more than who you is? whatever it takes to stay happy. we are all watching each other out of the corners of our egos. i'm not gonna lie though, i'm getting better at being my own truth. plaid and stripes, stacking up likes. just for fun though, go ahead, ask me why. she can read lips. I used to be so good at making bad decisions. "But who was that other girl in your bed?" Warm baths and waitresses in blankets, fluffy heavy hot water. as long as she got off, then hurting her was fine with him. wet clothes on the floor by the bed (a piece of your identity inside of blind and deaf icy definitions). if it's life or death, then I don't care who is in whose bed but I still can't help who I dream about.

I wasn't looking for anything, just wandering into the quiet haze ahead of me. and I find more comfort in the refuge of the present moment than all eternity. it is inside of this quiet place where I catch my breath each time that I breathe and I still have a million or more miracles to redeem and I do still feel paradise in these rapids even though I spiral through them without much to say for what I think that the final answers might be. the search for god becomes the search for self and I constantly mix the two up, but i'm sure that I could either get used to it or get over it. it's the stories that will never be told it's the fragility, the waste. it's secrets that people take each other to and the hiding places that they try to keep. this world is heaven, like what the city's chest looks like when she is asleep. it's a myth about a church bell and a children's game and it is found beyond those ghost towns and the unfinished fences at the ends of highways. it's the rampancy, the hunger, the dance, the disease, like the songs that I only sing when I get to be alone, visiting quiet graves at sunrise, when I catch the sky blushing mid-tirade and the wind smells like honey. when that which all else flows around fastens the deeper meanings I breathe deeply along the fault line of my being and I let as many of these things rewire their veins with my own as I can even though i'm still not used to it and i'm still not over it. I know that I will never know enough to get any closer by simply thinking and I don't know if it means anything to believe in anything, but I do believe that being as close as I already am is only the silence before the symphony of my peace. so hallelujah, whatever that means.

who are those other ten people in your head? you're just tired, you have no idea how psychotic you can get. maybe if we were better at keeping secrets than we were at creating them. the average human heart is only about the size of a fist, little bloody bubble, pumping web of muscle in hot veins pressed in your body's darkness. I love your body's darknesses. but you can't just go around saying that anything means more than this. earthbound ethereal, we are a blur to living stars, but the dead ones spin with us. when was the last time that you never woke up? you never know who is going to love you in the future. real life makes our love seem so acutely cute. you want the truth in detail or nothing at all.

should I say good morning or good night? my lips are the branches and yours are the sky. I could simulate drowning. I could dream with my eyes open. what I thought was harmony was actually harming me but don't get me wrong, darling. the things that we do for the people who we want to do... makes me wonder what I really believe in... she's so resourceful, my little sorceress. her kisses have become hungry crows in my poetry. sure, we lost everything, but at least we never really needed it. whiskey went to places, trying to take me where I couldn't follow it. hard-heart hallucinations as sober as some prairie sunset, paper cranes in a wildfire, smoke-swallowers with sword-eyes. show me how to alchemize a life, how to hollow out the moss wrapped around the sound of the mountain growing. the rain has stopped and the gloss is evaporating off of the skin of the city. I am listening to the voices tangling around me but I can't tell what they're saying. I see a hundred people who I think I recognize. the starving man worships his food. meanwhile, I just got lost trying to possess you. I can't go back and twist my life back on a little more straight like an endless summer day when the sun could have stopped moving across the solid blue sky and we could've gone on in that day forever and we were never really there. flatland lily pad, it was just a paperback. I could've never closed it or thrown it off a cliff. having a life is more important than having you in it. but don't get me wrong, darling. i'm feeling better already. nothing was ever planned. I identify more with reflections on paper than the ones on glass. I pretend to be unaffected, gentle and grotesque. I get off, I give back, swimming whimsically in splintering histories ((sweet sweet bb)). I am living in my story while it is living inside of me. but don't get me wrong, darling.