I am finding it very hard to leave this time. Something about the way everything is placed—with a thin layer of dust. The chips in the paint, the cracks in the wallpaper. I can’t imagine picking everything up and moving it all. The objects are heavy with the weight of childhood.
The damage is irreversible. The buttons on this machine cannot be unpressed. When you talk to me, I become a closed system. I can only talk to you when you are not talking about God.
It is the two lights I come home to early in the night, beaming from two different windows. The yellow light in the living room from where my dad sits when he’s on the
go to the loneliest place,
fumble in its silken innards
for keys, rabbits or fizzing candy
when our only obligation
is to never give up on listening.
after hell's frozen over,
you wake up to fern frost's
apologetic drawings:
"took a while to find the words."
beating
is kinder
than leaving.
sometimes I wish
your last words were
movements.
a hand against my cheek,
a fist to my chest,
an arm around my neck,
nails on my wrist.
the ache more real
and easy
to find.
every night I ache and
I point all over.
mostly my heart,
mostly my mind,
to the words stuck
that won’t loosen
that wedge themselves
in my teeth and fall out when
I’m drunk,
in his lap. he doesn’t need them, boy
that loves me until his
teeth rot, who says I don’t
deserve you who constricts
my waist with his hands and who
whispers I love you before
we fuck. he’s got courage like
the front lines of war
You imagine being a teacher by goose-fat, literature
Literature
You imagine being a teacher
To a grimy fork in the sink. You used to joke, grimly, that we lived
In Financial Times - and back then, all you saw was
Cheap chicken on a plate, carved up like Xmas,
Necessity writing a love song to indulgence,
A mind teaching a made-up mind to grow.
That was enough for you,
Nothing to speak of.
A mind teaching a mind,
The cognition growing like fungus in your sneakers.
The fairy glow of screens trembling
In shaky hands a cautionary tale,
Your mind is full of personalities and talking heads.
You are as corny as Sybil, a parable:
A mind growing, to teach a growing mind to teach
A growing mind to mind growing.
There was catered silence, wh
Nothing much is here
Red Naugahyde on the booths in the old-time ice cream store at the end of the block
A five-and-ten
Wires falling out the back of a traffic control box
Inside, we cook
We don’t clean
We don’t talk or touch each other
Outside, I climb the big tree,
The biggest tree
The tree I always feared would fall
Nothing much is here
no, i want the annihilating sweetness by v-espertine, literature
Literature
no, i want the annihilating sweetness
you were right when you said i lack
the nerve to drive my car into the
ocean. i stay out late, the splinters
of our electric city clicking against
my teeth, & come home to the flash
of your whispers flushing my body
with nervous polyrhythms. last night
i found the letter in which i named
your eyes orestes and pylades:
star-crossed & polished & eager to
settle on a cosmic altar where we
trembled as if we were glasses
of water & i've been wandering, i'll
confess, beyond the perimeters of
your damaged skin, beyond the quiet
fluster of your gleaming spine.
i wandered, with vespers foaming at
the brink of my eyelashes, rushing
to co
um. i spent a lot of time screaming in the ocean, i got engaged, i left school & went back to school, i developed & kicked a benzo habit, i spent a lot of time in the hospital, i was kidnapped by a friend & taken to some remote desert in arizona for a few days, i briefly fell in love with a teenager from michigan, i became somewhat popular on another website that's just as toxic as this one, what else happened, i tried to commit suicide badly & got a bouquet of new diagnoses, i got paid to have my brain scanned, last night i pierced my own ear in the library, i made friends in college even a platonic friend, i became less bitt
i drew a line in the sand and the earth split open by gliitchlord, literature
Literature
i drew a line in the sand and the earth split open
you set foot on my shore, stark lover
and left marks the tide tried
jealously to reclaim
rushing at your heels with amphidromic thirst
but never seizing
Achilles' terrain
retell your epic of purposed steps
traced in immaculate sands
and sea debts
but when the pads of your feet near my namesaken lands
let the ocean drink deep
your regret