marked his years with ink lines on left forearm. no. it doesn’t scan.
gave more of himself up than he kept. [it was a flawed campaign for a recalled product.] first woke up
wondered what the end destination for a course charted across freckles would be; was satiated on a southern path, and his tongue remembers. they do leave texture: he preferred that alternate smooth.
you don’t need to know. you don’t need
wrote poems of war in his own blood, vomit and shit. such holographic wills are legally-binding if properly witnessed; i call you to bear witness.
burned all the steak-ums and days later dreamt the gutter was filled with the war dead.
to walk across that desert to you…
convinced himself that he could pinpoint the exact moments they’d erase him from memory: 11:11, 11:42pm, 7:41am. he’d sometimes wake for no reason with an urgent sense of nothing. resigned to the same status as the dead, intangible.
wanted to write her into a book, chose words for actions, phrases for breathing the way she smelled at night.
hid the explosions of the midnight city behind headphones, sirens bleeding through, once watched them hose the blood from the street and gasoline after two vans danced around the corner, tangled, the very spot the crazy man had shouted in dozens: “Mayor Matt Driscoll is an asshole.” until sun rose, traffic drove over glass.
sat on the roof sometimes because he loved the smell of sun on tar. reminded him of his lung.
a spiraled coil, a field of red: he carried within him delicious genetics for heart disease, Alzheimer’s, a predisposition for children with inexplicable holes in their chests. vowed that his line would end with him, since his siblings did a good job of breeding.
reserved core terrors for plural pronouns and the fear of substituting new names into well-worn phrasal constructs. felt disingenuous and watched ceilings because he was so afraid everyone would see through his skin.
underreported the number of cartons overreported the frequency of meals never told anyone of the hours he’d spend lying on the floor.
once rocked forth, back, forth after lighting a candle now long melted into the rock fabric of a birthday gift, a monkey sculpture veiled with dozens of dollar-store candles [once wrote a poem] prayed the first and only time. [these penance years
never restarted his computer when prompted. allowed frost to build to ice in the freezer compartment until he hacked the tip off his one good knife and breathed freon enough to make him sit down. the landlord paid because he lied about the affair. not once used his toaster oven.
wondered if cats saw ghosts when they looked past him at nothing, attentively intent. wondered if cats talked to his dead.
fatigued by himself but just wanted to try something different for once in a life filled with static days.
the downstairs neighbor ran out to the street to help what was left of the white van driver: he stood at the window and counted the pieces of her as he drank milk straight from the carton: some conveniences come solely from a life without partners.
the end result of the total mathematical extrapolation of the designed ignition of infinity: collapse entire, cessation, wanted to beat that compression of all possible heavens by a record of twenty, thirty billion years.
the next time, that would be it because there’s only so much a person can give before recognizing such giftings deplete the essential desires to remain.
had the mis/fortune of being an artist born with a brain hardwired for logics and maths; some chapters augmented his internal mathematics of desire, her curves and planes and volumes.
slept nightmares drawn from futures forged of the gutted nickel cores of rock seas, unbreathing. woke too many nights to the recurring image: the staccato tattoo of a war without the possibility of surrender.
jog shuttle to pause, play: rupture, rend, rive, split, cleave:
edited a past away.
what you thought would disappear lies and waits:
wednesdays are the days we fight.
i’d ask you to call, but i know money’s tight the true change of that transaction still punched through your face i’d call every day if i could, but we can’t.
january cuts a deeper distance and sometimes i can’t taste the words you type. you often remind me of just how fragile i try not to be but am.
once you told me i was asleep when you got out of bed, asleep but i still asked you if you were leaving and looked so sad; i’ve tried dying those reflexes to departures.
i wonder if i whispered;
it feels like i would have whispered it if asked not in sleeping, if asking awake,
if asking you to stay.
once you reached for the light switch and in doing so, a tear fell from your cheek to mine. i never told you that because i didn’t want you to know how close you’d come to breaking my heart with that tear.
once we didn’t shout over something about dinner but it felt like it, and i apologize for not remembering the specifics. i wanted you to leave the room so i could pull the bones from the chicken, and stood there listening to the hot fat silently burn my fingertips and hoping to hear you laugh at something the television could provide.
we’ve fallen, and we’ll stumble, still learning this and i know the insecurities have to be exhumed and waked. i’ve buried so many of my loves, and you met me in an interesting time, i’ll admit. i don’t doubt you.
smoking my last cigarette and the snow’s too deep today.
“come here.” i remember the shapes of those moments, the Modular Calculus we figure each time we assert.
how “I’ll be right back” palimpsests the variables with which i’ve measured times, two minutes, five. thirty, after fifty- nine, i shift to hours and trust you’ll be back eventually.
others never inspired such trust.
i think the definition of a partner is someone you always want near, but you aren’t afraid to let them wander because they come back.
our calculus is of additions: cats, green radios, our bed, our house, augmenting concepts of home with plural pronouns, subtracting places and histories with a honed methodological approach, methodically approaching methods of subverting: i’m a capitalist confused by your anarchies, but i’ll learn you through them.
i read fascination into you. all the internal conflicts and external dissatisfactions i learned a collection of decades ago to forget; you reopen convenient scars and ask me to look.
it helps that you hold my hand.
i can imagine your fingertips typing, those same fingertips i cradle with my tongue, tasting us, those tips urging words into action, the letters a confusion sometimes that adds to my wonder of the way your mind works.
our mathematics— i want to learn you and buy our cat.
paul hughes, come
i’d ask the same of you, but your name isn’t mine; i’ve had dreams that part of it will be. i’ve had dreams of entering that city in conquest with you. i’ve had dreams of a coastal life. i’ve
because i’ve never been loved like this.
but
a heart can only break so many times before you start to lose the important pieces
the nearest unsteady light the return of books or the brittle desire thereof t-shirts you will never wear again pajama pants too big for you too big for her
thursdays are the days we fade
a fist bundle of broken glass beating, chiming sunrises echoing, screaming loss each departure a new crack each departure a new opportunity for scar tissue to encapsulate for the appearance of normalcy but the grinding of the heart’s edges goes on.
