was unknown in brevity, famous in obsession and little else.
multitasked his path to mediocrity: books, pages, digitally-versatile stubbornness borne on [did you know he was actually allergic to donkeys?]
i don’t know who i am anymore.
never tried a drug he didn’t fear, never didn’t fear You, that base addiction concreted, secreted in a night that he put his hand over your mouth so the neighbors wouldn’t bitch. knew then that your flicking tongue tasted yourself on his palm from cupped foreplay: [this isn’t cheating; this is friendship: beneficently extended.]
synesthetic in that he could hear your smile, taste your release. synesthetic in that he could live the shadows of you and die each time he felt for your heart-beats.
ate aspirin like breath mints.
hostaged himself to yesterdays. to three-times-nine, to fourteen-seven: to morning, afternoon, evening and night smoke.
once considered working on a bison farm because “artists” need real “jobs” to pay for cable.
[your dark exterior masks a caffeine-driven activism/] [you’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it/]
thought that maybe if he smiled hard enough, long enough, his face would stick that way [such childhood threats only work for negatives] [and no one would know].
realized long after they’d left that they were gone
long before they’d left.
stole poetry from his inbox:
Under the cheese, reconciles a breezy stain. Dresses by drugs, transmutates the acorn to guy. Ruined by chariots, wipes the light to guest. Transmutating, saying, transmutating, writing, stepping. Counter had a spill, which was not at all a gut. Tells cowardly, wordlessly, like keys yelling, allegedly. Seasons like rocks go slyly but angrily.
lonely man: suspensory particularist falconine boil lonely euangiotic
lonely man: wondered exactly when the future became a time when scambots used “euangiotic” to market cum-guzzling tranny vids and bigger dick pills [ripper cun7 open 2nite] and the. lowest. mortgage. rates. ever.
was never particularly falconine.
synesthetic in that the point is, i forgive you.
synesthetic in that he never wanted an acknowledgement, just silences
the suicide watch was long over, the july phone call of an angry father and halfhearted attempts to convince him he wouldn’t walk off the roof.
sometimes swerved into traffic. sometimes ran into snowbanks on purpose. sometimes pretended he wasn’t home.
the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, palm to breast, wondering which geography hearts learn first.
his madness taught him that tinnitus ringing through from first memories sang a perfect constant note, an S note, inextricable from musics that dredged and driver units, fifty millimeters spanning twenty- five thousand hertz were the most convincing evidence that he wasn’t in fact indistinguishable from god.
wrote such worlds into existence with maths learned in base one four seven fifty three forty seven fourteen made no sense to anyone beyond the periphery of his madness: for all we know, benton really existed somewhere dying at quantum light x and ghosts are nothing more than unrealized lovers.
let’s disappear.
wondered if the three seconds of static from two minutes, twenty-two seconds to two minutes, twenty-five seconds was intentional.
have you remembered me as he fucks you?
long ago forgot the ingredients of love if ever he’d purchased them in the first place. substituted distance for proximity and water for milk. burned the mess.
learned the result of making love is often a screaming, dying pile of flesh more self-inscribed suffering than infant.
the morbid lock with which he fantasized an elegant entrance to their funeral cars and the questions whispered by strangers, of strangers: was he? the one? who?
such daymares unseat the hesitant security of decades.
revised his histories to include suspicions. revised his memories to include evidences. revised his life to the end result of conscious constructions of begged pities and reassurances: we are here for you [based on truths we can never believe].
wondered what you were doing these days with your hairs or if maybe every reimagining of self was nothing more than a surface attempt to become present while underneath you knew the same battles used the same metaphors for us and plagiarized my hate.
surrendered more than once.
never had anyone travel so far away and come back to him. [these things happen in threes.]
surrender capitulation without white flags.
put down payments on too many others’ emotional dowries; invested too much of himself in the gentrification of exiled landscapes: he was the art kid they took home before they met the safe one.
argued the non-pre-raphaelitism of a proud antique-shop purchase and probably ruined all chances of getting in good with mom. [sure, it’s impressionist. sure.]
waited for the other shoe to drop. spent most days barefoot so he’d never break a heart. was accused of ruining lives twice. took heart in knowing that he’d not once made that accusation, hated himself more for self-ascribing all responsibility often broke plates and stood on them by accident.
knew that once he began to associate music to specific humans, they’d either die or cross the world to escape him. never again wanted an our song, but he did enjoy plural pronouns.
agreed with blair about ginsberg, but still wrote this.
editor recommended the expurgation of two shitty teenage poems from his first book, so he wrote a poem chapter in the third of seven entries, all math internal.
[the lessons of the second are that i can survive, and no matter how much you were to me, i will use the us we were to pay the rent if i can’t use you as a pillow.]
drove in circles.
light bulbs lasted for durations of residence because he preferred his work in the dark and found that he couldn’t proofread when the songs had words.
rusted through most recollections and lived as dust, wiped away more than once but always returning, an exquisite layer only visible under heartbeat scrutinies, mostly shed flesh.
reserved a large percentage of his willpower for a time when he’d not likely need it longer.
divided and hid his past [the electron flicker, stippled] into convenient sub-folders that only turned bold when someone actually needed him.
he hated bold folders.
preferred acoustic versions.
counted three grammatical errors in his deepest inspirations.
marked his days in the number of times he emptied the desktop ashtray; most days, three. what a war mask such ash could inscribe.
marked his months in the number of cartons, the handful dozen career aspirations and the nights they went to tully’s; had a specific memory of each booth.
marked his years with ink lines on left forearm. no. it doesn’t scan.
gave more of himself up than he kept. [it was a flawed campaign for a recalled product.] first woke up
wondered what the end destination for a course charted across freckles would be; was satiated on a southern path, and his tongue remembers. they do leave texture: he preferred that alternate smooth.
you don’t need to know. you don’t need
wrote poems of war in his own blood, vomit and shit. such holographic wills are legally-binding if properly witnessed; i call you to bear witness.
burned all the steak-ums and days later dreamt the gutter was filled with the war dead.
to walk across that desert to you…
convinced himself that he could pinpoint the exact moments they’d erase him from memory: 11:11, 11:42pm, 7:41am. he’d sometimes wake for no reason with an urgent sense of nothing. resigned to the same status as the dead, intangible.
wanted to write her into a book, chose words for actions, phrases for breathing the way she smelled at night.
hid the explosions of the midnight city behind headphones, sirens blee
ding through, once watched them hose the blood from the street and gasoline after two vans danced around the corner, tangled, the very spot the crazy man had shouted in dozens: “Mayor Matt Driscoll is an asshole.” until sun rose, traffic drove over glass.
sat on the roof sometimes because he loved the smell of sun on tar. reminded him of his lung.
a spiraled coil, a field of red: he carried within him delicious genetics for heart disease, Alzheimer’s, a predisposition for children with inexplicable holes in their chests. vowed that his line would end with him, since his siblings did a good job of breeding.
reserved core terrors for plural pronouns and the fear of substituting new names into well-worn phrasal constructs. felt disingenuous and watched ceilings because he was so afraid everyone would see through his skin.
underreported the number of cartons overreported the frequency of meals never told anyone of the hours he’d spend lying on the floor.
once rocked forth, back, forth after lighting a candle now long melted into the rock fabric of a birthday gift, a monkey sculpture veiled with dozens of dollar-store candles [once wrote a poem] prayed the first and only time. [these penance years
never restarted his computer when prompted. allowed frost to build to ice in the freezer compartment until he hacked the tip off his one good knife and breathed freon enough to make him sit down. the landlord paid because he lied about the affair. not once used his toaster oven.
wondered if cats saw ghosts when they looked past him at nothing, attentively intent. wondered if cats talked to his dead.
fatigued by himself but just wanted to try something different for once in a life filled with static days.
the downstairs neighbor ran out to the street to help what was left of the white van driver: he stood at the window and counted the pieces of her as he drank milk straight from the carton: some conveniences come solely from a life without partners.
the end result of the total mathematical extrapolation of the designed ignition of infinity: collapse entire, cessation, wanted to beat that compression of all possible heavens by a record of twenty, thirty billion years.
the next time, that would be it because there’s only so much a person can give before recognizing such giftings deplete the essential desires to remain.
had the mis/fortune of being an artist born with a brain hardwired for logics and maths; some chapters augmented his internal mathematics of desire, her curves and planes and volumes.
slept nightmares drawn from futures forged of the gutted nickel cores of rock seas, unbreathing. woke too many nights to the recurring image: the staccato tattoo of a war without the possibility of surrender.
jog shuttle to pause, play: rupture, rend, rive, split, cleave:
edited a past away.
what you thought would disappear lies and waits:
wednesdays are the days we fight.
i’d ask you to call, but i know money’s tight the true change of that transaction still punched through your face i’d call every day if i could, but we can’t.
january cuts a deeper distance and sometimes i can’t taste the words you type. you often remind me of just how fragile i try not to be but am.
once you told me i was asleep when you got out of bed, asleep but i still asked you if you were leaving and looked so sad; i’ve tried dying those reflexes to departures.
i wonder if i whispered;
it feels like i would have whispered it if asked not in sleeping, if asking awake,
if asking you to stay.
once you reached for the light switch and in doing so, a tear fell from your cheek to mine. i never told you that because i didn’t want you to know how close you’d come to breaking my heart with that tear.
once we didn’t shout over something about dinner but it felt like it, and i apologize for not remembering the specifics. i wanted you to leave the room so i could pull the bones from the chicken, and stood there listening to the hot fat silently burn my fingertips and hoping to hear you laugh at something the television could provide.
we’ve fallen, and we’ll stumble, still learning this and i know the insecurities have to be exhumed and waked. i’ve buried so many of my loves, and you met me in an interesting time, i’ll admit. i don’t doubt you.
smoking my last cigarette and the snow’s too deep today.
“come here.” i remember the shapes of those moments, the Modular Calculus we figure each time we assert.
how “I’ll be right back” palimpsests the variables with which i’ve measured times, two minutes, five. thirty, after fifty- nine, i shift to hours and trust you’ll be back eventually.
others never inspired such trust.
i think the definition of a partner is someone you always want near, but you aren’t afraid to let them wander because they come back.
our calculus is of additions: cats, green radios, our bed, our house, augmenting concepts of home with plural pronouns, subtracting places and histories with a honed methodological approach, methodically approaching methods of subverting: i’m a capitalist confused by your anarchies, but i’ll learn you through them.
i read fascination into you. all the internal conflicts and external dissatisfactions i learned a collection of decades ago to forget; you reopen convenient scars and ask me to look.
it helps that you hold my hand.
i can imagine your fingertips typing, those same fingertips i cradle with my tongue, tasting us, those tips urging words into action, the letters a confusion sometimes that adds to my wonder of the way your mind works.
our mathematics— i want to learn you and buy our cat.
paul hughes, come here.
i’d ask the same of you, but your name isn’t mine; i’ve had dreams that part of it will be. i’ve had dreams of entering that city in conquest with you. i’ve had dreams of a coastal life. i’ve
because i’ve never been loved like this.
but
a heart can only break so many times before you start to lose the important pieces
the nearest unsteady light the return of books or the brittle desire thereof t-shirts you will never wear again pajama pants too big for you too big for her
thursdays are the days we fade
a fist bundle of broken glass beating, chiming sunrises echoing, screaming loss each departure a new crack each departure a new opportunity for scar tissue to encapsulate for the appearance of normalcy but the grinding of the heart’s edges goes on.
the nearest unsteady light a burn barrel that wouldn’t accept the flowers i bought you the oven that ate the pumpkin pie i’ve put the rest of you in a box when are you coming? when are you coming?
please don’t ask if you don’t want my answer. please don’t ask if you don’t want me because i’m assembled from memories that could be lies missings so muches and i love you toos and i think of you all the times.
maybe it’s because you taught me how to play checkers
in bed
and i beat you the first time.
maybe only a poet could ever deserve to love you.
but i tried to learn your language
the subtleties and nuances of you
and there were great plains of you i never saw,
but i wanted to with everything i had.
which edges were lies?
that there are people who will wander the world,
never knowing the path of damage they leave behind,
always convincing themselves that it’s okay to walk away.
that we are downgraded.
that he hoped that someday, someone would feel for him a fraction of the love he jettisoned into the world.
that there are people who deserve your touch more than i ever could.
that there are some trips you have to take alone.
that i am faithful to dead causes.
that there are no second chances and barely any firsts.
that we can be cheated of futures that were never ours.
; that i will never forget the airport.
that i put holes in my body.
that we ran through a city and we were in love.
that i’d go around by Doney’s
to see you once more.
to laugh at that.
with you.
you told me where i stood.
i fell down.
to learn that language, to speak with your tongue
i’ve forgotten your taste but only mostly.
you were imprinted.
you’ve given me a window to count every fiber of my being, and every one agrees:
my worth has an inverse relationship to proximity.
maybe if i were a poet,
i’d give my life for yours.
i’d walk those streets with you.
calling all certainties forth to question: think, miss, love.
the heart’s sudden inability to unravel memory from lie.
we had a song.
the way a jaw works over words that won’t form
the way the chest hitches as the devastation soaks in
the gasping, flailing loss underlying disbelief.
of course you’ll see me again.
of course you’ll see me before i go.
of course i still love you.
of course.
of course i miss you.
think about you.
dream of you.
of course you’ll see me again.
of course
i’ve never seen any of them again.
of course.
because i would come to you
over the water
through hills and memory
i would come to you,
i promise.
through the fragile web of the distances between us
accelerating into turns
never looking back,
i would come to you.
i would run.
i would promise.
if you asked me.
i’d run alongside your code forever
girding for wars of desire without end.
was never known to command respect from his peers was known to steal his fourteen minutes in fragments was known to sometimes allow ashes to burn on his forearms and face while waiting patiently for them to gutter out because at least it was something nearing proof that he was there at all
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