we bury each other like hidden treasure
we didn't even try to discover
pay our respects to the pearly gates
etched deep in our shadow face
I've loved you forever and I will
even learning to breathe through gills
I cut into my neck
where noose kisses used to peck
this blood ocean I cried on loan
pacemaker of the tastemaker
I've felt the earth's mantle moan
magma maniacal and miraculous
conceived of a cold conservative calculus
the floor of your heart
I'm parachuting down
it is written in stardust
coded in our DNA
"I have raped your memory
and left nothing but the day"

mantle peace

discovery
where I've been headed all this time
perverted love
of war
cosmic harmony
at the convergence of our bones
and cold cold stone
architects of our escape
hiding in each others arms
prosthetic and limp
making our tools with tools
endless digression
of manipulative means
fashioned blood out of primordial mud
gods in reverse
lords of the perverse
I own you now
I have your head on my mantle
forever and ever and ever

directions to love

there's nothing more cliche than the human heart
she said knowingly

wishing I could show her my true heart
I let her perform my autopsy

there's nothing special in here, just blood and vessels
she said, knowing me

atriums and valves, the machines of betrayal,
myocardial

infarction; oh, but disregard this young old heart
it's full of dead arrowheads

shot from stupid's bow

I have nothing new to report
but whatever direction, way leads to way
and finds itself here again

the arrow points and I'll follow
looking for any pill to swallow
my soul frail and hollow

sucking all the poetry out of her kiss
and her tempered coos of bliss
spelled out on my grave in piss

anything

The infinitude of nothingness and time: an abyss before me, an abyss after me, an abyss not unlike me, surrounding me - not only me, but you and me, from the stars birthed, and laid to rest in the earth. This is our silence. This is our fight. Heaven or hell in a bedroom, with no bed, no windows, no one else in it. Or the unknowable purgatory of an heirloom with no heirs who shall wear. Rationalizing life as a side effect of the existence of ancient molecules, we live and wonder why.

The structure permeating or once permeating this emptiness was absolute. Sovereign. It gave birth to the means to categorize it. Measure it. Expound upon it. It is done. Evolution is a nuclear bomb, walking aloof amongst the souls of newborn gods aware of their own death.

Disciples hear me, they screamed at each other. Blasphemy. In the same breath, curses, loves, lusts, and threats. Indistinguishable agonies want each other. We don't. It was never different. There is no line, no expanse, only hope and fear. They, too, shall overlap.

Everything at my fingertips, I want it less. Life, I want to hide. Death, I want to hide. Love, I want to hide. Yet I will perish wishing I knew you at all.

want

i.

there is the thing itself
there is the failure to describe it
and there is the beauty involved
in crafting that failure

into a graceful dance
in a graceless chaos of space
enveloping the thing
the words, the sublimation

of suppressed desires
they coalesce into a whole
which becomes the new thing
and so on

the story goes
useful only in its newness
bleeding through the page
into the gauze I thought I'd escaped


ii.
I will bury you
a fountain of youth
and fragment into all of us
searching to find it

I have forgotten how to sense
I have need for your observations
beliefs and worship, blindly
mirroring down my sterling

forgetfulness, sinners baptized
in ink, flushed of preconceptions
dreaming a foreign love
extricated from the lotus blossom

bathing in death
we don't want to leave
I have room for you
in my cage