I.

instant coffee and probiotic yogurt on an October morning.  My fingertips
            browse your armskin   and sound as if they are
                        two pieces of paper touching
            while fluttering slowly downwards in a breeze.
                                    a tug in the stomach collapses me to knees,   
            paralyzed with desire, coffee atoms mix with plastic & I wonder who is most consumed by being.    
      I’ve been searching my whole life
for someone like you.      
Past lives. Past things. Cranapple blossoms blooming
on summering trees near a house lost. They say
            it is bad luck to visit the home you used to
live in. since fifteen on the road, motion
            sickness blurring ego into nonexistence.
Dashed, white lines flow back into
            blackness. Something like stillness in an
ex-lover’s eyes: best when dilated in the
            morning hours before sunrise.
In winter it is harder. Mother doesn’t call.

droplets fill the windows of our basement apartment, life, love submerged
into bowels of earth. snaking intestines of the world surround us, but
what haunts us—a child’s laugh—lost in paroxysmal wind, past

I have never been happier.
I am happy that you’re happy.

lips across earlobes, kisses instead of soft whispers. My heart
turns the roundabout,
            God in everything, il y a, illeité. mixed in like creamer.
most of all in the dirt in the cracks of your fingers, in your
            chipped teeth and bent neck, as you heave in slower, slower, slower, then
            again, our arguments sound like that click our jaws makes when sick
Just fuck me. Time doesn’t exist. Grammar handcuffs sex & language &

                        [ existence ]  into packets and packets of smaller things.
                                                I find Neil Bohr’s glazed eyes in my coffee grinds,
                                                             me to keep in mind valence atoms,      spin     in orbit   neverresting



II.
            We shift feet by a window of thick,
             glass-plastic, stare at the man inside.
Goddamn white kids, some of us got
places to go.
            So I ask for a Coke and slide a dollar fifty                            

I sleep in a post-suicidal house to dream. Strawberries
            sway and hum in the breeze. A naked lunch of crisp crackers &
            venereal disease, the slow grog of waking inflamed,
deranged, asunder.                                                           We need to do pelvic ultrasounds
to check for scar tissue.

            babe burst forth from the tube, ecstatic & ectopic & definitely dead. Before,
            things weren’t simpler, or easier, but they were better.
Then, me & life glanced each other sideways, and nodded.

Back to the block, some Tulip, Allegheny St,
            my body heavy and vision ever so slightly
            spinning. He leaves me to buy more from A, or Z, or Twin. A
kid stops, stares into the windshield with a
            childhood spent watching TV & junkies       
dancing with the dealers in this CIA-led
operation of addiction and poverty.
            I’m Twin’s cousin.
Sure he is. Everyone is cousins here.

Next to a K-Mart, that ugly strip mall turned live into —nothing— he leans back in the
            driver’s seat. Ego becomes extinct. Beauty is total purging of
            self.  Some nagging thought. I keep aware for cops & robbers
as he ties himself up and heats the spoon. People—families—walk by, don’t care

                        Later, we hide like fugitives in a
                                  friend’s room and tell each other
                                                               crazy stories from our teens.

Homeless & hugging the john, puking up
            Ramen and pizza crust             on the radio Nico sings,
            “I’ll be your mirror.” I edit stories & dry myself in sleep, my mind
notating night-sounds as I dream, “what self to actualize?” in violent,
            appending themes that dance, humming across my brain,
inner eye alert and watching.
Look. The balloons have lights inside of them.
Yes, so you can see the patterns they make in the night



III.

                                                                                  & in this child-like mindset, I realized,
the most important things are family, love, &—
            Family:                                              
ghost town of an ideology.      Mother: a womb like cheesecloth;
everything seeped through. She’s herself when we’re
            at least 2000 miles away.         Sibling: detached
                                    form of brother or sister                     

The last I heard she broke her hand on the piano.
My father, “Dad,” lost far in the woods of his own mind,
                         could I fly? to the cozy warm home of your sacrificial this is where I’m from.

​

My sister and I light off fireworks on the
            6th of July in the backyard
of a stranger’s house:
            No Adults Allowed. Hendrix roars
from illcit speakers & we dance
as if the past five, six years never
            happened & it rings of heaven, creating
our own private haven in someone else’s home.                                                                         I used to hide in the study when they were fighting.



The microwave beeps. I hang
clothes to dry on the TV; it reminds                                      
            I feel incredibly happy right now. Do you?
Yes. My heart is heavy with emotion.
mon chou of the one he smashed to pieces
            when amphetamines told him he had to
break something to prove he existed, is existing

Don’t worry, my days of radical self-realization are well behind me.
I’m not worried. I hope those days never end.

Mottled leaves flutter across a park
   bench            lost in laughter , none more
immune to the cold.                             we pretend to be
   guides for the camera-laden tourists that
            flock to the heavy statues and buildings. And on this spot in 1892…
   But I slip away, to the in-between:
                        a dotted white line that exists where it did not a foot behind.
            Poor cat found itself alive in a microwave in one fold of reality
and dead in the other.                                                                                                 

            See you later?



At the 49th hour,
            you leave.                                          
I linger at the open door,
            body halved across
            public & private,
and close.