"I will wake up in someone else's bones." -- Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf

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alcoholism finds a way.

in your marrow was

the strangest stream--

i must've sunken

as i drank

no news MS

you'll never have a second to yourself i say as i sit alone fifty feet into this tunnel staring back at the half moon of light at the entrance i gave up concealing

"sometimes one will disappear into himself like a ram charging a mirror" --Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf

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alcoholism charges.

i braced, had my hands in position, but

distracted with the feeling

of a silken hair on my cheek

i might as well have been

a pane of glass

Kaveh Akbar, “Desunt Nonnulla”

swivel, and think.

fill carafes of time with coffee, fuel caffeine leg's unconscious morse code with the ceiling beneath, swivel, and think everything delivered is just shrapnel found from the blasted vision of what I anticipate.

mine will flood.

Never knew shouting at brick would weaken my own constitution, nor that anger blacksmiths the eyes to betray your innermost thoughts. If your dad didn't live in limbo is a question that never finishes itself. It's like a "rock" and a "hard place" are his mouth and backbone, his heart caught in between, flaming in an iceberg. But I know I've got one, too—an iceberg around my heart, that is. Except mine will melt, mine will flood, filling his limbo with my own aquarium of hate and goddamn if it isn't cold as the sunless bones of trench fish. Anyway, I'm drawing out these metaphysics on a wet napkin, stringing a trip wire through my teeth. I don't want to smile at anyone this way, but sometimes even family doesn't deserve to learn from comeuppance.

a dimension.

Heavy morning gray. Sky's belly full of stones. Seems like the only time the eyelids of our hometown's antique storefronts flutter, show off rooms overstuffed with junk, bushy forearms on ladders tearing it all out for another brilliant failure. Every drive to and from work shifts from color to black & white. Everything slows on this side of town. No one dusts its history except to finger half-detailed diagrams encircled in perfect rings, something that starts and ends and continues to end with no start. Can you see our talent for youthful retirement? Our overdose in the quicksand? My stepsister's mug shot showed up in my feed with no warning, mouthing (possession with intent to deliver). Your sister's two kids stay wrapped in a cradle of their grandfather's worry while she punctures a dimension into her forearm in a trailer behind Mattress Firm. My hometown—our hometown: breeding ground for bastardized children kicking rocks fallen from gray skies, for addicts entwined to family fuses.

call me into yours.

don't reminisce without me there to twirl turnstiles from your hair, lying heavy as logs blanketed in moss, candlelight pulling premonitions from bedside smoke. it doesn't make sense how loneliness begets memory to beget artificial belonging which only begets loneliness, does it? because without all that shit, maybe I wouldn't scribble my head blank overwriting memories, pleading from those turnstiles for you to call me into yours.

maybe I wouldn't be lonely to myself. maybe you wouldn't, either.

what of the present the future.

Try to convince myself not every day is a new day yet every day I wake disoriented thinking what of the present the future will decide retainable. I'm afraid of Time running out of ways to gift-wrap itself. If Dread didn't criss-cross through me as discreetly as conversation between two couples at dinner, I might be able to stay throbbing in the moment, dredged and drip-dried, quilting a sturdy web from the luster of our commonality. But as of now, nothing would keep me from being caught and sheltered in it.

Robert Desnos, “No, Love is Not Dead” taken from the anthology Surrealist Painters and Poets

what secret.

someone's always sitting in a car when I get out of mine. I don't know what secret I'm keeping, but it's mine; I walk away like a blind window.

wallpaper centuries.

Not sure how grout and mortar manages to unify our living boxes against the tension & pressure waging inside, nor how we collected all the nonsense from nature to make them: the deconstructed, uncooked, unmelded—base.

It's useless to trace history's braille down to discovery, but some two-dimensional craving coats my tongue regardless. I just want to be as sturdy as what we've made. I want my chateau to stand pretty in the swamp and light up a stray boater's face once it looms into view. A grand, creaking mystery so irresistible they'll obsessively strip away wallpaper centuries until they hit the mortar, grout.

looks like.

that would be nice, wake up the wrinkles, maybe focus on what i've crammed deep like marshmallows in pockets to remember. 1) clean the morgue in my trunk one ikea sack at a time, or 2) fix the bedroom's crooked curtain rod. small-fry chores as crucial as the foot of a mountain. can't tolerate the heavy roll of bodies with each pothole, or the sycthe of light that reaps into the pre-dawn dark, but looks like I have no intention of clearing anything, repairing aything. watchful eyes close on the weekend. I've already left with the rest of the audience. couchlocked, I'll wait for the cream in my coffee to coagulate an answer to this week's premonition.

without extinguishing.

where is this going? a whirlpool chokes all the time but I can't force this down. descend the stairwell leave the work phone swinging pendulum to my footfalls. palpatate to stoke the fire that rips through each atrium, wood where there should be brick, but the burning eventually ices my heart without extinguishing what's locked inside. and it'll keep going, until the ash looks just like snow. rare, expectant, always the last to go.

brittle.

allergic to the way my wishes see the stars flip a bitch and come right back at us.

can't bring myself to speak the answer nod my head in a way only I know, mutter fuck you for guessing wrong.

tried leaving the lion in its cage left the TV on for unconfined voices to attract the confined, one cage to one skull.

don't like that the karma coin I flip goes straight up do like how it shoots through my earthbound wishes like butter

flaming pieces fluttering miles down to our hands now just newspaper dim orange creeping inwards to the same image of an eye, unblinking into ash.

i’ll try not to let you know tomorrow.

Hit & run in a dream I didn't even turn my head. Guess that was me looking out the window instead of answering my boss's eyes as they doodle perfect circles to my face— spend most days assuming she paperclips each new note taken about me behind that one. rely on my organs to take care of the rest, gallbladder dreaming away slander-tisements on last night's binge-watch; liver dreaming away the Lime-a-Rita I drank for lunch as the stimulus panted for a knock on my office door; lungs filtering dream pieces that float under the door, or from your lungs, head turned into my neck like you're helping me hide a hit and run—something about today i'll try not to let you know tomorrow.