monochrome and bare until a drop of sentiment
now stuck spinning in an iridescent kaleidoscope somewhere
friction whispers in a long-awaited embrace
with overwhelming attachment to the silhouette, in plaid.
ritual trinkets exchanged like crows
bartering banter to distract from tension
this hallway encounter is too swift
to laze around and express opinion.
pocket candies weren’t half as sweet
as the kiss planted on my cheek that night
frozen, cryogenically.
feel for the flies suspended in ice cubes:
one million reasons to melt
yet remain cold, resist the thaw.
since all I am is a dusty lollipop
and you remain the bible in my hotel drawer
every dog has fleas, every mailman his satchel.
reckless driver to highway hearts
turn collisions into concrete dreams,
beneath the velvet friction of soft hearts
comb bullet casings from the garden bed
the calibre of these words, shrapnel.
take aim with this language
so comically sawed off short
that it kicks back
and breaks the nib.
a broken shoulder,
a shotgun wedding.
August, 3PM
i feel like the fly suspended in my ice cube
forced into a peace it didn't ask for.
never really observed until his end
i shouldn't be able to see the individual units of his eyes,
should not see the segments in his wings.
his purpose is to be swatted, not seen,
nothing more than a nuisance.
he lands on food and pisses off mothers,
flitting off before he’s flattened onto kitchen walls.
maybe because the AC is broken
and everything seems slower
but my tainted ice cube feels like an oil painting
he is only now perceived in his frozen state:
once so good at being bothersome, now i see more
than the jerk that landed on my watermelon.
if he knew where he was and felt my eyes,
he probably wouldn’t want me looking at him.
paper plane
careful creases consigned to plain paper landscapes
crooked like the teeth smiling at its departure
cracked cuticle hands lay flat wings that soon
will glide smoothly as your hair lays-
frizzy like a crown of thorns;
feeling all crucifixion and no Easter.
thrown like a dart, your discus to my Hyacinthus
and with a stray, solacing something you strike me,
vague and vagus, unnerving.
though i spilt no blood
and there is no tragedy to be turned floral
you try taping tears never torn
botanically backfisch, carelessly callow
pubescent, puerile, and perfect-
she blooms
you broke in boyhood like old sneakers,
grass-stained and dirt-scuffed.
mine was like church shoes,
crisp and clean, yet stiff
climbing trees with left foot, right foot,
left hand, right hand,
like the heartwood pine,
coniferous spine between them,
your familiarity climbs higher
than my awkward hips, chest and floor bound
taking the falls now
you remember scraping your knees with.
when i fall to the roots
be the petrichor comfort
as the rainy season stems claw back alive.
budding pinecone and evergreen,
i breathe loam and you breathe easy
bully
the palaver in your playing
rumbles a tensely chromatic
resentment that no poet
nor player has struck me
with before. your ardent
appreciation for this art
and even more so
for the arrogance aimed
at your subordinate
a few branches lower than you
rots me at my core
i feel myself falling from the tree.
bully (2)
you sip slowly the poison that did me in.
defector to decadence in place of the
slow yet sturdy, the polar to that poison,
poison like ariel’s berries on horseback.
candid as godiva until
that candor gives to construction
but a pine frame must rot
after it is caressed by time.
she has stripped you to bone.
enter my inner orbit,
revolve around scathing sun
you have become my mercury
let the precession of your perihelion
not tug you from me slowly
because from 29 million miles
i can see Calorous Planitia
every scratch in your surface
and you feel the heat of my flares
88 to 365, let us spend many earthly years
as the closest of friends
your soul is chestnut, warm and earthen
and sustaining in every aspect relating to
me, who appreciates the roots you’ve now taken
and the leaves dropped down to
me, who leans upon you for shade and
sleeps peacefully, in the wake of chestnut.