She is busking under
new moon, folded tight
in darkness, water
claps and waves
in quick, pointed
shadows, sneaking
ears she’s seen
before, who carried
off her balls of tuft,
pink, with teeth, still
baby beaks; cracked
silence.

There’s nothing
left (to lose) but one
lunge and porcelain
snap and no note sung,
fox-strung like a broken
violin neck, dragged
into the brush.

dioxide feeding and release.
Breathe, deep blue-sky melting into
boiling orange, latency, latent
heat phasing into a midsummer’s

nightmare of anthropomorphic
seizures; a juiced, bruised orange.

It’s a dark night when your shadow can hide.  The moonless sky brimmed
full with ticking tension, leaking gas waiting to be torched.

I called out to you, but sounds hide in the dark, too.  You imagined you heard
something in the breeze, but you can’t see me; I can’t see you.

I looked in a bathroom mirror today, and I think I saw her hiding behind the soapy bar of hope, holding hands with a nameless man who stroked her hair.

Here is now, which means to say that here is where I am—not her, but me.  Sometimes when you look into my eyes, you can catch a glimpse [of when she’s gone]:

To lose yourself is a strange kind of loneliness—it’s not like a lost lover or a misplaced letter.  It’s like you crawled out of a chasm deep inside your chest, and breaking free from your ribcage, you jumped out and ran away [from yourself].  And when you’re gone, the chasm hurts like someone scraped out all your guts and stapled you back together, confused and empty.

Gutless—I’m always hungry, hovering in the in between of what is here and where I am.

And it’s strangely comforting to be desired for consumption, that someone wants you even when you want something else.  It’s like an apple when you’ve been craving a peach, fleshy and soft, but it satiates your aching gut until it seeps and leaves you hungrier than you were before.

And sometimes, when I rummage in the attic or the corner of my heart, I catch her flitting somewhere else, in a memory or dream, always looking for something I didn’t know I’d lost.

The sun never set on a soul so full of fresh
love, humid bay-breeze swell, swollen
glacial melt—and love is like the sky: vast
new world of precarious conditions: burning
with old scars, lovers past, pain, your eyes
in the reflecting pool, deep sea drowning.

Yet time—it moves like these mountains, rolling static,
beautiful corrosion; life, this sunrise, catching light of dawn.

I can see the firstborn in your flock; he claps his brother’s back,
Draws close and says, let’s go out to the field of shadows.

Red seas weep for lives lost short; I clasp my knuckles white—
Will you reach down a hand and deliver us from this shadow?

Grab my rib and break it back to crack, and find a vacant tomb,
A shrine I carved and exhumed for your spectral shadow.

If I offered bloody sheep, or cows, a bull, or hearts, a soul
Would you reach down and cast a protective shadow?

I searched the Promised Land and found a broken people,
worthy of love, yet left to wander in a state of warring shadows.

Fresh frost cakes our earth
in tinder-ash, suspended
memories:
bit-finger blues—the coffee’s gone
cold, dregs of our lingering
conversation; another sweet
wheat breeze blows warm—neckline
soft(er than these lips) like your eyes,
baked fudge brownies, hashed
with laugh lines (pain):
residual relief, smoke-rings of a language
time lost.

II.

The night the world went blind—
black as day—the end was nigh
(but wasn’t near) and laughter:
tinkers off your wine glass,
spills your blood, remember?
Copper, mint-smoked mouths exploring
words like mine and yours and ours—
we want to own what isn’t (ours).

 III.

Remember the way diaphanous
swished, hints of smoky bitters
before you spit it out—a dalliance
with dulcet tongue, enchanting whirl
of shapes and sounds, lovers:
tongue and cheek dancing
to the beat of an age-old music;
we dance and love.  We; us; ours,
helpless, drowning in a crowded mine-field—
light one match and watch the world
go white.

I twist and swim and find black pitch
lining the apex of a new womb.

Overdeveloped bones break, osteoporosis
fully developed in a fully sin-slicked soul.

Boiling black-stick festers down my tendons,
tearing open a schismatic chasm that lies

pregnant between us.  I bleed; words coagulate
and the water’s rising.