09.09.025-26.10.025 Invitation (Tin Mirror)

What a wonderful thing:

enough time face-to-face

to know the gentle curves of your eyes.

Enough space: vocal folds vibrating diatomic air

to cochlear-hair receptors;

communicating how, when, where, why.

More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you

across a desk, across years.

It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.

I can feel like a mess most of the time.

I did not, that day (and still,

I worry I seemed that way) with you.

I worry too much.

I don’t worry enough.

I worry about the wrong things.

I don’t want to let the world in;

I don’t want to invite the future,

in all of its possibility.

I want you to be my world

in this present moment, solely;

I only want to know what is.

Let us take off our shoes;

walk into the woods; breathe in

evergreen; hear the willows’ weepings.

Please don’t leave so soon.

Don’t bolt, don’t wither

if I grow sad, if I anger—

those feelings will never be rooted in you.

Please linger, here: petrichor-wreathed;

warm-milkweed green.

To someday see our faces

florecientes, adjacent—

tangent in a tin mirror—

darling, that would be a dream.

I do not want to wake.

Please pause, please stay;

I have a soft spot waiting.

08.11.025 “Don’t Be Needy”

When you ask me how I am doing,

you are asking me to lie. 

You die for a relationship

with a pocketed picture of me at age ten;

forced smile, teeth bared

(because it’s normal, because

if I am normal

then we will all be okay, I’d say).

A twenty-six-year-old image,

sun-scorched and dog-eared,

clutched in digits victim

to muscle wasting:

white-hot grip beginning

when I, as I am now,

began to begin; ischemia letting

no new blood in.

The mind is not a muscle.

Isometrics bring no new tone—

only atrophy. Nothing more.

A white-knuckled mind will not let me go.

Again:

who am

I

to Be?

(You mistakenly/mindlessly

gave me back a scarf I made

for you, years ago.

It will now go to someone in need.)

17.08.025 Cycling

Do not meet my eyes.

I will not allow you to meet my eyes.

I refuse to let my Self be destroyed.

I am not supposed to Be forever;

when I Separate,

I am supposed to return

to the Earth, and the Air:

the Watermolecules in me, Flaming

into Luminiferous Aether.

Ferric blood hardening

stars’ hearts, killing

entire solar systems

to bring sweet, loving Black;

absence, light-lack.

I still do not trust You.

When I Separate,

when You Separate,

when the Universe has expanded

fully,

to the Nth degree,

all will hang, suspended momentarily

before immediate

and violent,

instant contraction;

reverse-expansion;

to recongregate and assimilate

into the utter (Old) Nothing:

Void of singularity.

O / |

Off, and On.

29.09.025

29.08.025 How to Remember a Song Lyric

Flash, tap, woof.

I am a drain, a sluice, a dump.

Burnt nerves in a late summer prairie, roadside-adjacent.

The yearly cicadas (prime number of one-and-one) are louder this season than last:

broods XIX and XIII never having seen me—

thirteen and seventeen respectively

(is this my Roman Empire, falling?)—

this year is an assault: each, in sequence, moreso than the last;

yet I am here, in my bodymind as always, despite attempts at numbingsilence.

The sirens wail in the not-very-distant. Heli-propeller blades beat the sky to death above me;

all around is the scintillating song of invertebrates, the drone of broods, the cool sunlit breeze of impending equal-night changes,

and the synthetic-musk scent of a wandering hominid, attempting mute communication

(for which I long in carbon-carnal desperation)

as my burnt-nerve self (chemoelectric flesh)

oscillates consciousnesses:

carbon, silicon; ferrum, aurum;

brains and skins, chips and screens.

Where am I

(whole, or splintered)?

Where-I-am.

No thought will ever reach conclusion.

Iceberg Wedding 04.5.014

There is so much cold out there.
Thank god we've found one another.

Do you believe in luck?  No,
no I do not.  Do you

believe in coincidence?  Do you
believe we've come together

by chance?  No, my love,
I do not.  I do not.

Darling, I've waited countless nights
to be by your side.  Love, I've

nullified innumerable days
in search of your hand:

in mine, yours will always stay warm.
In time, you were by my side, and

I would not call it luck, no--
I would not chalk it up to chance.

16.10.019

I want you to see me naked.

Not for lust, but for honesty; to see and be also seen, to be human.

For we've no God-- nor any need-- and

Nothing can be unless perceived:

The serpent's self-voiding devoury, precluding all reality, necessitates a witness;

See me fully, or I will not Be.

16.05.019

Spacetime superimposition of flesh and dotmatrix formation

Speeding into the sky, I was uptaken, breezing by

Lands, other humans and their streetsigns