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.

 

sunday in march on st. johns on the bus

When baby cries with exposed teethlungsbelly rip, give him orange juice. Woman with enough braids to bring out carpal tunnel digs into plastic bag of groceries for remedy. Baby is a bean jumping out of mother’s arms and when woman pours orange into empty bottle, there is no sound.

a visit back to exit signs and U-turns

What is there to do here besides loot mother’s pill stash / cover limbs in preservatives and aluminum slashes / memorize the pattern of face expansion and bleach stains on adolescent scalp in framed photographs / watch television for less than ten minutes after realization there is no substance to these moving pictures / eat crackers coated in the aroma of childhood / look through cupboards and count the deer marching in backyard/ & / wonder what part of this exit still exists in you.

[fugue]

she makes love to the hysteria of inscriptions on sternum

stop me if you’ve heard the one about the gender neutral pronoun and the one who got away because that one did not prefer leashes like this one or the time the basement flood like her body on that Wednesday in August or when her lover threw fire against that pile of bones and what they wanted were ashes but all they were left with were doctor’s bills.

On exit 9, one may collect residences like sexually transmitted diseases: a starting place of hope leading toward infection and regret. On your right is the time she almost hung herself with view of geese and donated benches. To your far left, the school she ran away from.

She used to wear dresses; she still cuts her own hair; she is no longer a virgin; she still dreams of death; she has replaced Plath with Bukowksi; she still cheats and hijacks bodies; she hoards secrets and screams; she stopped telling them what her plans are.

What is there to do here besides transcribe the vital signs from one doorway to the next / feed limbs to the ghosts / memorize the way cracks and weight gain allow room for swallowed analyses / memorize mother for signs of openness / eat enough meat to bloat away the aroma of aged vegetarianism / look through self to search out what has changed, shifted, evolved, calmed down / & / wonder what part of this exit still exists.

what it means to feel what it means to feel

Unravel what has happened: death, four lost limbs that belong to another country, hunger, a mother that sips pills as breakfast, fear, that time a staircase lost its angles and tumbled away, silence, that memory that exists like a movie trailer with gaps and voiceover and who really knows what is really real anymore.