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

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.

Zipper to the clouds extinguish

Hell with a little gravity like a lighter

To my eyelash swift

As tornado hissing touchdown into butane cock

Your head—I see: the painting looks straight from here observe

And you tell me if the hand ever hesitated a stroke I

Have a feeling I know the feeling I

Am composed of masters too selfish to teach lonesomeness

A siamese voicebox could help hurt less but when

Hell is reduced to hot white ash weeping stalagmites there will be no pain I

Can dump the ibuprofen in the parking lot run

It into pink powder as a reminder we

shouldn’t have to worry about downing 1 perfect circle a day.

I can't take anymore fickle friendships. Anymore bullet holes still singing orange-black in my terrycloth head, through which I can still perfectly see you beveled into a facelong grin.

You've made my face an abandoned honeymoon. You've left my mind a condemned house. I nurse our memories where the doorbell doesn't reach.

dawn, white curtain sunblock: what's left of you dimming in the room, an implosion of absence and sun-filmed dust mites: cloak of

heavy after-shower mist fogging my brow: pisces horoscope writing itself in tall letters: running out of space at my hariline margins.

khaki-pocket a pill and walk backwards into the day find it stitched gooey into the seams after laundry: so some puzzles can be solved: even if too late: swore I wouldn't let this disease be an excuse:

swore I'd never move us into a keyhole: now that we're here: how do we learn to wait for it? the smooth, endless plateau of patience mopped and polished and slippery: just for us

"just for us": something we think to ourselves: just for us, for me: there's a strange greed in uniqueness inciting you to strip it away: find what it's covering this time.

onset hibernation

Never seen the sun saw thru the horizon. Only when I learned violence did I approach it this way. The red, red sunset. I used to think maybe God was recording me trapezing my tightrope shortcut home. But why me? I heard in a fever dream that performance is never as good as practice. And surely, I've proved it. Shaky ankles, breath gone water chestnut: Signs of onset hibernation. Sweet dreams funneled through a cyclone, emerging as gunshots into the falling sky.

We hold our heads differently every day. Emotions make an incoherent map. I could be here, but feel there. I feel anywhere but feel there. I'm beginning to see how often uncertainty changes address. But, taking a swig of second thoughts--- this happens all the time. Pop my knuckles before passing the baton. Admire my reflection before leashing and walking it into the lake. I never thought to learn what it means to navigate Until I forgot where I was navigating. That day, a beautifully fake bouquet rolled from the cemetery and onto my lap. I affixed it like a lightbulb above my bed and wake up every day with tears buoyant on my cheek.

one at a time: I've come to peace with the tiny steps I'm taking towards the explosion. eyes set on it for so long, suddenly everything is less disastrous than I'd make it out to be had I succumbed to stride— each curly lock of ash is a gnat. in fact, I wouldn't mind if things never came and keep never coming. trumpets could blare from the trees telling me to force my joints against this 3-foot pool of time and turn back, but I'd choose to hear seraphim calling me poolside from their playboy estate in heaven.

Some things, you carry with you. I get that. An image, or passage. Sip on that glass of sweet tea, carry the whiskers bubbling through the ice logs. Glance down at the party barge, dismantle machine from lake—carry. I'm closing my eyes and looking all around. What is it you said? I could use that to leech these things to my brain's undercarriage. It's mutualism, baby: feed me memory dope and I'll be the only mind making sure you live on.

growing from branchy ventricles of the forest's heart are gallows and their fluttering echo—reaching pine heights.

you can't hide what once happened there, or here. scars stitch the air like Nikes and sell them worldwide.

you always said shooting stars have cratered Earth for millions of caskets, and now I know it's true.

I've got five hands and each one wants to flip off a mirror or something else that resembles my blankness when faced, or defaced. Behind each famous painting waits a cartoon of me, somehow still needing assurance it exists.

The Last Wash (Missed Spot)

Ever felt so empty that you crawled into yourself? 

How far in did you go before realizing you're a cave, not a tunnel? 

When you left, did you detonate the entrance shut just to find out a whole city had been built around you?

Hopper | Hopper

bleeding from the nick of time

damn, I can see the mosquitoes on your skin from the window. obese with your desire, or confession, which is probably why you're peering down at the porch like you want to claw through each board and sleep underneath the house. or maybe it's the way he stares at you, makes your hands jitter. thought y'all stepped out for air, but I can see your mouths moving for something less than that. I can't help you if all you can do is burrow away from everyone. but, knowing you, your confessions are probably flying away right now to whisper into the neighbor's skin. oh, you forgot they were there? our house is surrounded by a deep, sightless dark. in fact, it's the same exact dark whose heart I broke; couldn't bear the wedlock anymore. but the night doesn't forget, comes back every day to cling on every window, moon in its stomach.

Hopper | Hopper