how to find life within the death of a pause.

Approach life as an experiment.

My habit is to feel everything. This is all just glass and it has been scored and electrocuted into a movie soundtrack. This film is not yet rated, yet it is already banned in more countries than I can pronounce. I am just looking to gallop inside a human who knows how to loiter away the grime of non-recycled memories. We sat on a bench where I wrote my first song and you shared your anise and anger. A photograph of my mother twirls above my bed from that time she channeled Virginia Woolf without realizing. I study her black-and-white gaze as a reminder that there is always something to scrape at from the outside. What I wanted was to touch your hand from palms toward psalms. There is a piano wearing the threads of composed sorrow. Maybe we can dance into the moon, dressed in keys and strings. I will never be easy. You will never be east. It may be difficult to find peace within the nudity of your gender. But this music. This music has limbs that can hold you in the evening. I will be found upon morning, wrapped in alphabetical orchestras and the instrumentation of salt.

 

when they go missing

This is all a blur. This is too big to carry on back with or without scoliosis or strength. This is too windy so that everything rushes out of pockets and everyone knows you can no longer get through a day without:  chapstick, that rock they gave you, two tissues, tiny folded bits of  poems, a pin that when you press it music blurts out, some nuts for protein, a pen with someone else’s name on it, the photo of them without you, some rain stolen from when it fell off some cloud somewhere captured in a pill box. These pockets are deep.

When they go missing, search milk cartons. Search lamp posts and grocery store cork boards. Search alleyways and abandoned warehouses. Search the forest behind their house. Search rooftops and fire escapes. Search other bodies and linger until some other sort of sensation arrives. When they go missing, buy a plane ticket, go to hospital, cry in front of an audience of strangers, walk around nude beneath midnight, have an affair with another part of your body, slam memory against brick wall and see what colors converge. This has nothing to do with you. Sometimes people need to exit in order to feel like they exiSt.