Month: November 2014

The Eggshell Remembers Wholeness

Because it’s safer, because the
shadows hugging its eyes
only linger. I don’t know why—we cloak
the mutants, the hopeless
rhythm out of sync that coaxes
itself to horizons and cleanses
those eyes drawn

in faces. I’ll never know
the sack of garbage dreams
double-crossing one another
to the finish line. Beneath this perch
under the sky, 10,000 tons of water
compete with rotted daylight,
just enough to singe the floorboards,
warm the stinging snow, the buried
that never had a chance in the first
place. I can only anticipate. Dig a grave
for each ripple waning so indistinctly.

Learn to expect it.

Atrophy

something’s rotten here. I can tell
as your body rejects its bones and marries
itself to depth, as it memorizes each pore’s
capacity to repulse

the other in grandiose
ways. You take off your clothes to feel your skin.
Shave your head to know the icy drip
of the air vent on empty

follicles. Imagine
how this cold would feel without skin,
When you’re naked and tangled
within darkened bed sheets and
glowing like italian christmas lights,
take everything off

and you’re still
drenched in something faceless,
this prickling separation masked
flimsily in coats of ash; you’ve reached
and cut your fingers on fractures.

Silent Architecture

Encryption is the night’s language, the only language, the dust shaking
from the scaffolds and all the steps once bleached in old daylight
tip-toeing in morse code, don’t ask about the ripped bed sheets —or why
you keep forgetting your last name. The possibilities of silence are better,
a cocaine angel that paints your face and relapses elegant stacks of smoke.
Take in every vice besides friendship and you’ll live forever. It’s science.
Your car is crashing, only you know how the dance starts, how to end it. It is the introversion, inverted, the catalyst never quite good enough,
authenticity’s mirage worn as tired masks. I say all this under the vein
of the night. I say this while all but parasites sleep, and white dwarfs rush
over the floodgates and splinter into a hundred wounded flowers.
I say all this and wonder who hears.