four

when "i want to get high with you" sounds the same as "i love you" and means just as much and the needle sings like its hitting the vinyl instead of the vein and its singing slow gold angels just for you, angels singing on high high i love you. absolutes & promises curl sweet out of the ceiling tiles & settle soft as hiroshima ashes all over our polaroids, over the rest of the mess that we've made. so we are all limbs and long angles, not even pretending to be so perfectly gilded, sweating honey slowly swelling to fill all the spaces between. see we've made the room round now, forced flowers from the carpet where the corners used to be. see we've made this so easy, hazy, so perfectly dull, nothing could be so heavy as our eyelids, these angels whispering lullabies for the last love left on earth. the way that only dirty veins deliver such sun-washed dreams, dripping ageless hallelujahs on the bathroom floor, teardrops i can't remember, white dresses, a wedding right here. honey slips the seraphim out of focus -- & with my head on your chest i can feel your slow breath carry me down into drowning. with my head in the crook of your neck i know this state of grace, the colors of a sleep reserved only for children and the dying.

three

you, the boat rocking and the swell of the sea, the waves lapping against the hull of my heart. i have set out like so many life rafts for rescue, bobbing at the mercy of your tide & temper, the shift of you to guide me like the phases of the moon. i have not charted this course. i have drifted towards you, windborne, wrapped in sails for swaddling clothes, windswept & untethered. i have not charted this course but i have mapped you palm to palm: head, heart lines intersecting, life lines the language of loose tea. and like tea leaves we make an unlikely prediction, with one name. two people. one shape. then what to do with the salt of the sea caught in the open wound of a heart not broken but bleeding ? blood in the water & salt in my veins -- so salt-stained i search you out. here against the moonlit limits of ourselves here where the night folds blueblack into the sea, where the moon is doubled against the dream of itself. we will be no different. my skin the ocean follows the weather tangled into your hair. the night sky & i have mapped you star to star: this gypsy system comes the closest. you plumbed my depths and tied your anchors to my ankles and now i search your shore for safety. the swell of the sea, you & the water under me.

two

i remember the last time i dreamt this death it was the 90s darling, what did we know. everything would be too ominous. pale white lies pale blue eyes linger on, we have allowed this. the breeders come on loud on the radio while i'm working. l'abandon abandonné , she said if i spoke another language this would be the time to break into it. sounds like stealing. breaking & entering, pressing charges for the hearing of her heart (it really goes) yeah there's no language for your presence pressing all of this into diamonds or something dirtier not clear-cut not princess-cut. love qualified in carats, kilos. or quantified, yeah. zap the adjectives. do you remember because i don't.

one

it's not that i don't want to go out it's that every muscle has been so sweetly defeated & why haven't more dancers taken up poetry, written ? clarity of pain must mean something such sacred monsters feed from it (die by it) live it alone. it's not that i don't want to write it down but not to be held down tied down lift me up on out of it oh my star. self-plagiarism could still be a crime. self-sabotage is art now art for whose sake it's all tired now tie me up wrap this around me. it's a new decade will you write your destiny down a passenger manifesto for fight or flight in these times. these petty crimes of blood & bone continue to fascinate, decorating diseases with long adjectives as if science had ever been a comfort yes layer letters over me lie me down. this will only take a second. lights out breathe in & you're back again. cells divide & conquer and i was telling you about this, how i had wanted to be religious. lighting candles or something but this is so much closer. this is what i know. one of my windows won't close all the way so now i have winter slinking around the corners of the room, only the sound of the wind but the chill stays. the days start to get longer & my tendons too & we're growing here, me and you and the new year, we're making space where there wasn't. it's our job. you can't just take up space like knitting make half a scarf & leave one leg in the room. so this is the real pure ache of longing it's the body pushing back. this kind of ache is intrinsically solitary. not wanting or needing but after the fact, after the flood. there are names for these muscles in pain but i like the mystery, knowing it's mine. it's been years and now another.