heaven beside you

open sesame, pink mouth’d fräulein

swallow your medicine

although your throat is dry 

focus your roaming eyes on the headboard

count the sheep and categorize 

slaughterhouses one through nine

the air’s the same as it was in twenty-twelve

athough the ground moves differently 

it’s the same sort of hell

who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

the stairs have stripped their soft confines 

to lay bare their nails to meet my soles

fluorescents flicker their old-gold hue, 
as useless in the daylight as they are in the dark

I pass by the front door on arched toes and look out- 
the grass is so green against the asphalt as to become luminescent

I drum my staccato heartbeat against the walls 

the beige paint responds in patterns of light

in cyrillic and arabic, 

messages I could never understand, only witness

I am obsessed with almost everything

tracing with fingertips

the minuscule hexagonal structure of my own epidermis, 
how the mummified fly on the web can not scream in any way that matters– and neither can I. 

an invisible repeating line of footprints in the carpet

back and forth
in the same place in the same way at the same times.
a life like a palindrome, tick-tock on the metronome, 
we all go back and forth forever. 

This house starves its prisoners

I bang at the window
I do not look out the window.
I forget I have a window, 
for the curtains are so dark. 

I wake with bloodied knuckles 
and write them off

I do not go by day or night- 

I must have been born asleep and stayed that way, somnambulant bat with giant umber ears 

ringing with its own echo, 
searching for a fly that was mummified long ago

a struck lamp-post vibrating, lantern strobing
like a nightclub overhead a dead road

I am wrapped up tight

an eye is just an eye unless it is your own, then it is a well
a well is just a well unless it is the one you fell in, then it is home

in all the finite immensity of spacetime, 
outer bodies orbit in predictable measurements

everything is according to its own set of rules

7 years ago I was calculating for Europa’s orbit,
just a little bit off he said, without even looking

I lay on the cold tiled floor 
my cheek hot as fever 

this planet is a stranger to me 
I tug on its coat by accident in a crowd 
and it looks back at me, confused 
it seemed so familiar from the side 

I want to fall into it 

slide down a rope made up of many other ropes, in vibrant color 

crash into a sea of ribbons and gauze 
I want to crawl onto the shore underneath the bridge– frozen through

I want, I want

the birds traded their souls for wings

the spirits by the roadside dance to your delight, blind driver

you’ve got gilded fins no matter how hidden in the din of all the minnows that fly by night

there’s eyes in the striations on the strings connecting their collective at the speed of light

mycelial wire-bound messengers carrying transmissions from post to post

tears gather in polyisoprene irises, the rain falls rhythmic on the road. 

If you could only listen to the music, deaf rider, you’d hear us all calling you home

your tires crawl over, careless, this machine’s built to do what it is told. 

Your heels are leaded, you know where you’re heading and all we can do

 is watch as you go

between your crowded ears a hand twists a crank and brass pins pluck brass teeth

through the rusty music you can hear your mothers voice 

“There are places left untouched

within all of us, you have swallowed a key

alongside your first breath of air.”

you can see her waltz upside down with your father 

in the rearview mirror, her dress brushes past your hair

“The illusion reflects us as 

we reflect it, there are gods 

mechanical and corporeal

we live on the body we’ve built

from another. we live in bodies

borrowed.”

the reddened sky is in the pools of rain on the asphalt 

even now, you travel on arteries

“I know, someday,

that you will want to break the mirror.”

the moon watches on, faint and mournful

as your grip tightens on the wheel

stonetooth

on my knees i look for teeth 

on the muddy ground by the backyard creek

toads stare at the air with unblinking eyes and their croak

is the sound my heart makes when its overfilled itself

and spends its night with its hands on the porcelain

coughing up years of accumulated rot

but when the toad makes the sound it is for love

when I do, it is not

I remember my mother’s snaggle tooth, a curved fang

amidst a cream-suited procession, a snake in the hutch

I remember my dead lover’s snaggle tooth, twisted to face

inwards towards his comrades, a traitor in the ranks

nothing beautiful is perfect

I’ll remember what’s been misplaced long after 

everything symmetrically sound has been wiped away

I have such the same malformity, 

though not as front-and-fringe 

to notice you’d have to reach in to touch it, 

to find it, hiding shyly, curling in on itself

There is a Physiognomist smoking a pipe in my head 

this is a sign of a crooked character, he tells me

good, I say, so let us be crooked

it is better for our branches to reach out to the light

I love to love liars and I love to be loved despite

how I cry as frogs cry, merely part of a larger orchestra

of homeless buskers that play for no one but themselves

(for who else is there to play for but ourselves?)

I pick a tooth from the creek, or perhaps a tooth-shaped stone. 

This will do just fine I think, it’ll fit in well enough with my own

this is the thing about a broken heart

it should be treated no differently than a broken bone

we speak of doom and sore-crossed stars, monologue

about the predestined tragedy of it all

but perhaps fate is always changing its mind 

its eyes are cast on the rug not the threads

and our little weaver is bored and tired and knows 

accidents will happen; people will fall

we set it back into place with a shout or a whimper

wrap it up with a shirt or paper, then we’re a little 

weaker forever and stronger for having overcome the pain

Not even cicadas know how to fly

I watch them crash into trees as 

I empty my tin bucket of painted shame

into the running water 

from its mouth trots out 

every mistake I’ve ever made 

and they salu! with little clay arms

and dunk their buttonheads under the water

the Physiognomist blows Os towards the ceiling

buttonheads are a sign of psychosis, he tells me

I can’t bear to sit and watch them swim around

so I head back home, full of wounds within and without 

if a planet explodes and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

creatures of doubt trade time with creatures of instinct

passing it between themselves in a crowd as one passes out drinks

they make idle chatter, about which of we knows better, the ones who act or think?

feathered beasts stroll the promenade, making passes at each other,

smirking laughing, looking downwards from the gallery

among each and every there are bodies, whose hands and minds have formed

tunnels of death, among the hesitators there are detractors

their calling is a bloodless vivisection, and they wield questions like a weapon

unmaking nature's naked truths in favor of dull domestication

the animals applaud their failures with morbid fascination, they watch them consume

kill, steal, wreck, and with bitten nailbeds they stare with blown up eyes

and write and write and write all about them 

I’ve always wondered if it was lust or fear

or a fear of lust or a lust for fear

or all together at once in motion, uniformly crawling forward like legs on a milipede

birds such as we report our findings to a hanged god

whose body litters the far reaches of space, it is gathering dust, and somehow moss

and it hears nothing, there are not even echoes in this place 

suppression

the stag knows, familiar the feel of the hair on the back of your head

the sound is a sound omnipresent as the ringing in your-

river rambling over your submerged ears

He lifts you up to taunt you just to shove you under again

this is how the apple bobs- with rocks inside your gaping maw, this is how he haunts you even when he’s gone 

the lamb knows little and yet more than most, 

knows how to soothe, knows what to say, 

knows what to cover 

and how to hide, knows how to hold you 

and how to bide her time

so as pages turn you can see a pattern emerge in the ink 

that sours the fiber- 

you’re wounded and you’re bloodied and raw and before

you bite she muzzles your maw

Now now, darling, don’t hate- you should feel bad for them. 

You stay your hand you bite your lip

but the anger stays, a rattlesnake, wasps buzzing by your-

Bathtub faucet scalding as it runs over your submerged ears

He knows familiar the way you writhe in fear 

and he lifts you up to laugh and you laugh in return

you find that inside you all fire has died 

and the sky is a blanket no noise can travel through

you get hit in the head, you apologize 

you stage your own mugging, fist your hands through your pockets, you hold a gun to your own chest 

and then you drop it- hate along with it 

and you are lighter than air- you float above the ground

and apples flit around like lady bugs and land in your hair

the stag pulls you down periodic 

his hands briefly mnemonic, it flashes behind your eyes

but you catch it and he pulls you up to watch

and you watch back

feeding cat food to the leopard slugs

I caught a gnat 

stuck to my hand
smeared its body on the dinner table and
went on with my life

a million synapses from a microscopic mind
swept up and crumbled in a tissue
thrown away
I am aware, and I think of this, 
and I still kill. This makes it worse.

I pretend to feel guilty,
just to myself
I am on the stage lamenting 
gnat #16,874,926,454
I am the only one in the seat
staring blankly. Even I do not believe me
But we go on with the show 

I would’ve passed the prison experiments

deflected the Lucifer effect
I would not have administered the shocks
I’d light every anthill on fire 
even though I know they are not so different from us. This makes it worse 
I’d save every dry surface worm
Just to starve the birds 

I roll around on stage, play games 
exclaim “Nothing hurts!”

Scientists have recently discovered that flowers sing their distress and impending death
that insects hear their mourning and avoid them

I dream of the symphony of a burning field
and a dark cloud of dancers swarming 

I clean out my ears with kerosene 
and smoke in the garden

“Boom!” I pretend to explode 
she gives me a half hearted smile
and walks off, tired, as I make a racket
as I rip off my clothes she exits, absent
“See? No scars! No bones!”

I am afraid of my own smallness
and how easily it can be wiped away
erased like an errant mark on a pristine page
I only killed it because it was flying in front of my face. 

I only killed it because I could.
This makes it worse.

I shout and shamble through the empty rows
Nothing hurts! Nothing hurts!
Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

pretending as directed 

to be numb to the world

saturn

Oh, young defector, why’d you change your mind?

I followed the path from your brow to your mouth

dove in, drank you, pliant benefactor

our teacups gather dust in stacks beside the sink

so we drink our wine from the vase and it tastes

of rotten flowers 

I feel it all around me surrounding and trying to get in

the hour is a dense fog I must squint to see through

but see through I do, I see you,

I see you now and I see you as a child in the crinkle of your grin, as old a memory as a coiled wire telephone

It’s all relative, my detractor, 

they stamp the same branch of veins in all varieties of materials, flesh and dirt and minerals

you lay into me and tie me into pretty knots, 

O willow I bend 

for you, my teeth yellowed pearls against your roughened fingers 

Same matter, same second, I can close my eyes

and your weeping hands fall upon me as do locusts from the sky

In the bath, the air shudders in and out of iridescence 

and I can see us creatures as if from without 

without a body the passing seconds capture and contain,

they hammer stoppers into our arms

to collect the sap from our veins

I can feel every piece of 2024 

as if I am watching it from 2067

life is a fragile flame, I catch on to you 

Curtains, carpet, bed, framework, and we burn 

I dream of my mother’s death for I fear 

I will never be ready to be anything but a daughter

We will reconsider, we will think it was a mistake

I will look back with wooden hands and scream, munchian, engraved upon a fleetingness

It is inevitable, dear deserter, can’t you feel it?

Your own last words are already hanging inside you,

bats asleep. 

It creates only to eat.

If you hold me in your palm tightly enough,

I will not escape

I will trace the path from the lantern to our graves

I will wil-o-wisp your way any time you should ask

as long as you distract me from the gun

I love you, take me, let’s spin all chambers

I feel lucky, fuck me

let’s have a son

you’ve nothing but what you've been given

My tea is full of nicotine 

I drink and chew the leaves

I put hypocrites like you to sleep when I

scarcely dream 

the mantis queen doesn’t know my name,

though her soldiers prattle up and down my arms all the same

all in formation in patterns unseen  

the cattle lay siege to the wooden fence in the night

glossy eyes like mirrors in passing headlights

they know nothing more than who you are behind closed doors

I titled my ear to hear and I’ll tell you what they told me;

That hares hide in fox skins when they’re scared

that feline hierarchy in truth, pays no mind to verticality

I walk backwards down the stairs

his name is nothing, no one, absence

his power is that of negation

shoulder-herald cawing an old song

into the ring of your ear, 

into the shell of your skull

his cadence is double-negative

whatever you say, derivative

whatever you feel, chemical

his power is that of negation 

you are a soft machine filled

with blind mechanisms 

his talons toy with switches in your navel

Old prince, never king, he flits around

with wedding rings,

delights in impossible promises

bowed heads, arched necks 

‘In the bed now,’ he says, 

‘then in the distant cell of memory, 

then in the haze of nonexistence-better yet a hot flash behind your eyes 

while your vehicle swerves and flips and skins the road’

do you think  vultures can taste longing

beyond the acid on their tongues? 

little star, never sun

did you know they ate the sky while you were still young?

there was once a ladder made of moonlight

do you remember the smooth breeze of platinum in your hands?

no, you wouldn’t, would you

I plucked the memory from you 

as you would a daisy,

petal by petal

until there’s no wonder left 

only metal

shoulder-herald, earth-bound son 

he reaches and he winds and winds 

he hides under your hat and in the barrel of your gun

his power is that of negation

knocking on your door, sliding down the bannister

You know how it ends already,

he curls around your eyes

pale claws picking at your mind 

why do anything?

why be anything?

why breathe at all?

maze

the wine dries,

dried blood smells like wine,

a snake twists round an old trellis outside

green as greed and glistenin’

like dancer's skin,

he lies with a knife

under his pillow, a knife lied 

in his bed 

a snake twists round

a broken bannister outside 

and I can feel its slither within my head

curling around the past

every thought every thread 

swallowing me whole 

needle through a hedge 

we didn't build the maze

we were just born in it 

wandering its endless corridors

with tired eyes 

frostburnt coals 

I’ll schedule you in

lost you, lost you again

my fairweather friend

I’m making plans for next week 

we’ll have brunch by the pigeons 

feed them half of our English Breakfasts 

and we can sit on a stump in the woods 

and argue about nothing;

no, I’m tired of talking

change of schedule:

I bury my phone by the oak in the backyard 

deep in the grassless mud and I walk 

to the nearest gas station, maybe

I climb into the unlocked trunk

of someones car and I get out 

when I feel it stop moving at a red light 

and I run out into the forest to the hymn 

of condensed traffic

I think about this 

all the time 

something about.. everything 

makes me tired of talking 

makes me want to live with little sparrows

on their little, happy, hopping feet

and their tiny, searching, curious eyes 

something about poorly designed urban planning

and traffic and cookie-cutter-catalogue american architecture 

and dead raccoon, dead fox, dead deer, dead cat, dead dog

dead man cut in twain staring at the sky, side of highway

the pink flower of vulture’s heads pecking 

downward, downward 

I’m simple really 

I’ll make dandelion tea 

I’ll crush berries with my feet 

I’ll make a pie of pine bark and poison

sell it as Homeopathic

next week 

limerick, lacrimosa, limerence

 buzz of confusion, blurry eyed 

little black hairs line the rim around the sink

a single-file army of disembodied ant legs

left behind by a vengeful deity

all too often I forget to observe 

sleepwalking in a haze of old hurts 

running over them like a tongue runs over a cut in a cheek

slowing healing for brief satisfaction

if you placed me but ten minutes away

from the house I've lived in for sixteen years 

I might not be able to find my way back home  

I've been nothing

all this time

tired, listless

almost blind

false vacuum

 your dreams of omnipotence overcome you

the loneliness of others is easy to see

it secretes from their laissez-faire laughter

radiates forth from unshuttered eyes 

i watch them move about their lives with a pity 

a projection of my own reality 

how small these people are

small their sufferings, small their joys 

a cuckoo clock existence, it rings 12 

and they come out on conveyor belts 

bend over, kiss the hand, twirl around

and back through the doors 

effervescent inadequacy, 

courage in the tiniest of life forms 

glass bottles turned to pebbles at sea 

perhaps this is how it'll end 

in an instant, in a blink

as fast as light can blind you, I always thought

the best protection we're ever given is our own eyelids

so that we may lose ourselves to darkness when necessary

perhaps this is how it'll end

a box cutter tearing a line into a tightly rolled ribbon 

we'll come unfurled, untangled, forgiven 

my dreams of omnipotence are only 

dreams of a power great enough that i would be 

safe enough to forget myself entirely, I want

perfection so that I never 

have to worry, I can dance through life

unfettered, telling all in drawn out whispers

'what if this is how it ends?

in an instant, in a blink 

imagine that 

close your eyes and picture 

yourself on a brink

toes in the air, heels on the cliff 

you've been given the gift of blindness your entire life 

imagine if you could truly see with your useless eyes?

the yellow moon is an eye, the sky a stomach 

and who are we but tender morsels lain 

to dissolve in a bottomless pit of bile?'

the moonbeams touch me with their long nailed hands 

I close my eyes in respect 

nothing great 

desires to be seen 

all the angels

live inside hidden things

blades of snakegrass

turn back slender hands that may shatter between the smooth pads of your fingers 

turn them back to the beginning 

I slip out of skin as spirits slip from sleeping bodies

I slip out of sleep as lithe legs slide from stockings after mass

 

have you kissed the knuckle yet

have you knelt at the foot of your bed

aching for the past 

I found a ouroboros twisted into a double helix 

hung from a branch and buried 

behind cascades of Spanish moss 

I unhooked its jaw 

pulled the tail from between its fangs  

and when it finally had room to speak it whispered 

careful where you're standing, girl

once this was a seafloor

all your mountains underwater

you'll find their fossils in the caves 

keep your footing, keep your mind 

you never know when either 

will falter without you noticing 

once I was a serpent, grand enough

to swallow you whole

now I am less than the length of your arm 

see how decompression makes pitiable monsters 

of us all

I returned the snake to its rightful place 

hidden in long blades of grass

knowing it will only revert back to its previous state

after enough time has passed 

careful now, this was all ocean once

keep your footing 

lest you sink

and all the wheat will catch fire

a few hours before the sun rose
she got in her busted-up car and drove
out to where the fields were wide
empty and barren
out to where the road thinned and roughened up

she pulled the car alongside the surrounding tree line, turned it off
stumbled out drunkenly and walked
as far as she could into those fields
step by slow, careful step

when her feet gave in she collapsed to the ground without a noise
and stared up at the dark sky

after a few short moments of this
all around her the fields began to grow
wheat threaded between her fingers and toes
they grew tall rapidly
and when they stilled she shakily
reached into the pocket of her coat
and pulled out a handgun

she pressed it gently to her temple
left it there
as she breathed in the new harvest
as she revelled in the not-yet sunrise

then she pulled the trigger
with an exhale
all the wheat around her burned to nothing

when the sun was finally hanging high overhead
the car, the wheat and the woman were gone
as if they had never existed in the first place

and who's to say
if they ever did

I wonder how many miracles 

have never been reported

living easy

call me Atonement
the contract-killer

the sarcophagus has room for one more,
you'd always lean in to whisper

11 at night, 

my cat starts foaming at the mouth like a rabid animal
goes limp in my arms

10 at night and you're whispering again,
drunk this time
we're both vindictive alcoholics
but all I do is beg, this time
pride is the first thing I lose in love

9 at night and I walk the needle-edge of life
the burning trapeze, my feet aflame
my eyes are dark and the sky?

Who cares for the fucking sky anymore?

"I have come to learn ants from my time in isolation,
they're constantly moving
occasionally stopping by one another
sharing pheromones
grains of sugar
and crumbs to bring back to the nest,
if you watch them for long enough
you can see that
they're no different from us

no different."

the magnifying glass massacre
the tragedy of flip-flops,
of rain

2 pm on a Saturday

I think of what you said over the phone
while I watch a PowerPoint presentation
of your life
while I watch it pass over a picture of you and I
smiling next to each other in a chain restaurant booth

I'm trying to hide my face in my shirt

and all your crooked teeth are showing

yeah

you were right

you take the devil out of me

gone, gone, gone

whispering kisses growing cataracts
touch like the wind as it sweeps past,
retracts

steady cancer
lives on, millenniums
grabs the gasoline, opens the window
plans for burning

and I keep turning, turning in my sleep
correspondent, unresponsive

I like the demons in your eyes and the light on your skin

but my eyes are not where the demons live
they live in communal dens, collapsing huts
always moving on
always walking towards

something, I'm sure


small hands clasped on shoulders,
I'd like to sit and be held in your cut up arms
I'd like to fall asleep on your chest
some devil's own morality pet

I hate mouths- I hate lips, I hate the wetness and the sounds

but I'd take you in
and I'll take the devil out of you, eventually

hunt them to the brink of extinction

as your fingers dig under the rim

I'm your pet, I'm your girl,
I'm your exterminator

you’re my world

snake eyes

the devil and I rolled dice in a dive-bar
thirty thousand feet above the ground

I wondered while the clouds swam past
if the creators got it wrong

that when the mastermind above the sky
was rolling his million sided dies
he kept ending up with snake eyes

I keep ending up with fives

we took shots of milk and vodka
and he steepled his hands together like the characters playing him in cartoons often do

gave me useless life advice like my father used to

we watched a few aircrafts fly by in silence, playing our little games of chance in the deafening quiet

after the final roll it was clear that I had lost
which I should have expected, really, considering

he didn't look as happy as I thought he would with winning
just deeply, inexplicably tired

he let me stay on the cloud with him for a while longer
and I nursed my white russian as I looked downwards
at the earth

which, very slowly
started to catch light
and burn