the sky opens its mouth like bursting hearted halo holder

these two hands, they shake because they are not big enough to unbreak all the brokenness, all the car accidents, scraped knees, and dead parents. dawn's temper tantrum finds me bleary eyed and seam shattered in the wake of all the unholy visions sleep gave birth to. these cities, they churn us through them and spit us out, leave us vibrating, humming, collapsing on curbsides, grasping for other hearts, tears tormenting the pavement. i will not let your light be eclipsed. i will not let your heart be swallowed. these hands, they are small, but strong. they can't do everything, but they can do much.

on the day it rained horses, i swallowed a birdhouse

when they looked inside your guts they found salt crystals the size of apples. they told you angels had been sleeping there. the beds were freshly made and still warm. they asked you if you had any enemies, people who might have a grudge against you, might want to hurt you. caught off guard, you started quoting tolstoy. their eyebrows shot up like bottlerockets, foreheads like week old newspapers. you cleared your throat, embarrassed, and said "no...not that i can think of." outside, a bird slammed into the window. you were thinking of old lovers. one of them was rummaging through an old toolbox, the other was pouring tea. this was an oddly companionable silence between strangers. for a moment, you wondered if maybe this was the afterlife. you sneezed. one of them grinned. he told you that you just needed to sign a simple contract, pulled a cat out of his coat pocket and handed it to you along with a pen. "it's not legally binding," he explained. the other was still rummaging through the toolbox. "aha! i found it!" he said and handed you a shabby blue scarf, stale smelling and full of holes. "if anything happens" he said solemnly, "use this."

brand new forever

pull the shutters closed on your own well-swept invincibility and lie behind the shade. you can find brilliant blues beneath the murmuring grey nothings. i don't claim to seduce worlds. i'm not the greatest, or the best, at what i do. i have a lot to learn, and it begins with whispers that get louder and grow into boulders. i just walk around sometimes, for hours, and the hammering pulse of the city is too much for me. i just walk, and the cars and the buildings turn absolutely horror show all around me.

one hundred starlings writing words with their wings

i like the way the streets are deserted at 5am; how you can barely tell it's morning. you can walk and hear nothing but your heartbeat and your footsteps. wisps of dream drift like smoke from sleepers in their beds. the sky is particularly mysterious. and if you are awake enough, if you are paying attention, you can hear the faint murmurings of some secret being whispered, meant only for you, in only that moment, and you never can hear the whole thing. but i think it's a process; that you gather all the bits you can find until you have enough to put it together. and that's wisdom. like saving up for a piggy bank. i think if there is anything we are meant to learn, it's that.

god's fingers on the spine of autumn

there is a certain perverse beauty within the slow strangling desiccation that ever accompanies the whistling rhythms arranging and rearranging themselves so resolutely inside midnight's blinking posture. just beyond the frigid air forcing itself upon the starlight, there is warmth. it is beneath my corduroy blankets. i will meet you there.

sling your guns sir, this is a revival

don't listen too loud. there aren't many safe sounds around here. you're clearly a person of great distinction. i wouldn't want you to wind up in a situation you couldn't read according to familiar maps. things here are not what you used to be used to. it will take some adjusting. now the first thing is, you have to focus, concentrate real hard, you have to remember dying. you have to remember your own death. otherwise you won't believe. see we've all done it. but it's such a shock that most of us don't remember it. memory loss is known to accompany severe trauma. until you remember you won't be able to see the way the sky looks like a marching band. you won't get to hear the way the flowers sing like lounge singers. you won't be able to feel the riotous orgasm that lives inside music. the thing about death that nobody realizes while they are still alive, the thing about death is, it is the railroad to god. and i don't mean god as the living have conceived of god, i mean god as god actually is, ineffable, indefinable, the very limit, boundary, end of any language's ability to know, to articulate, to encompass. see, you wind up here, and once you are dead, there is no need to talk, because understanding, knowing, pervades everything. you have endless time to explore the intricacies of the world you never even glimpsed while you were living in it. i have spent years just watching dust settle. a century watching a sleeping woman breathe. ten thousand years inside the wind. do you understand how many different faces there are to a single leaf, a single blade of grass, a single drop of water? no, of course you don't. but you will.

glow quietly and scream moonlight, this is our last kiss

The rhythming of my lungs bellowing a slow motion projection on the inside of my chest, the tracings of silver on the edges of my heart, my arteries weeping helpless and lost. We are stuck here. Stuck between living and dying. With no instructions, and no test to tell which voices to listen to. The city an orgy of tangibles in an ocean of invisible. Our prayers find themselves caught in the brambles of each other's anger. We wade through floods of cash, useless, an absurd facade, liquid power. The burning cities are the last kiss between two people who are not special, who have no clear future, who are strung out on their own ambitions, who dream in black and white, and never question the ways in which this cultural violence is carried out. It is a mutual suicide. A lack of imagination. It is death by neglect. Dead flowers. It is done.