Space Boy

tiny fists reach up towards the night sky and
he wants to touch them, touch the stars,
gather them like glowing seashells in his palms
and let them warm his chest on cold nights

the tangle of cool circuitry weaves under
his skin and metal and flesh become one
lifting him up higher and higher and it’s
close enough to burn in the sun

the only lover Space Boy knows is the cosmos,
shaped like rosy bouquets and valentine
chocolates from the store down the street
he recites equations for relativity like poetry

love notes in glass bottles are thrown
into the sky, but shatter at his feet

Paper Valentine

He wants to take the word “Love” and
crumple it up like a paper Valentine;
Stuff it into his mouth,
Grind it down,
Swallow it clean.

He wants to take the gaudy pieces
Of candy and crush them under
The heel of his boot
And then snort the dust
If only to feel the burn
Of something that isn’t
Heartbreak.

He wants to smash the memories
Like a broken coffee pot on a lazy
Sunday morning and then crunch
The glass into his hands,
Across his palms, and smear
The saccharine
Blood across his face like
A savage preparing for war.

But he does none of this. He
Crumbles like stale cake and
Waits for someone to move him
and his cracked frosting heart
With the rest of the rotting refuse.

Drowsy Bifurcation

She’s sunshine in the form of dark
edges and half-nibbled jars of strawberry
frosting sweet enough to make you
sick just by looking at it. You touch her
charcoal-smudged cheek and drag fingers

down along the distant column of her neck,
smearing dark lines that steep like
rooibos tea a little on the burnt side—
always a little on the burnt side.

You keep a messy room but a tidy
heart, books scattered but the walls
scrubbed clean of dirt until your
nails bleed from the hydrogen peroxide,
a parochial washing of your whimsy
because you think maybe— maybe—
it’s just something your soul needs.

The knot of time remains firm around
the hollow of your throat and she—
a thin dash of burnable sunlight trickling
into your atmosphere— and she— the
dark seductive curve of a calligraphy

pen at an errant hour of the night—
and she slackens the rope and sends
you on your way, stumbling, jealously
reverent, palms bent hopelessly
towards the sky— searching.

red white blue

snorting clouds of white aspirations and
getting high on scattershot clumps
of broken ozone that crumble into
rubble for the impotent greenery
we lay down and breathe

I want to drown with your
cinderblock hands around my
ankles until I bleed billowing blues
under Salem lakes
and sputter for asphyxiated love love

love love love lovely
Asphalt smashed across a
blossomingly bruised face
drip-dribbling copper red dancing
on the tip of my tongue
like tangy little pinprick soot stars
deflated and drifting downward

I lick static in the air, I lick
static off your irradiated face
and we belie a better sense of self,
versions of the self selfish selfless
self of the none for no one no more

Jupiter

Watch my breath expand like wild hydrogen,
fields igniting under the weight of my
burgeoning ego that consumes and conceives
like a vacuum in space hung among the stars

Pinpricks of light, of life and love, are swallowed
down like an elixir and finally I flourish;
my world expands and so do I, claiming
the space that belongs to me, the hollowness

that generations before carved out for me,
for me and only me, with my stars and sinew
expanding like the roots of trees and the
inky outreaches of the universe

But how far can I expand? I watch my fields
burn, the embers tickling my bare ankles.

Weird Love

It’s the brittle tenderness of a realization
founded upon unsurety, snagged in
between shreds of fluctuating identity of
both personal and private and why can’t
they just function like— like a normal fucking
thing.

A unit. A— a not quite couple, not
quite less than that, but something wonderful,
something terribly idiosyncratic with its own
mechanistic way of existing; visceral with its
mandible and black beetle wings, tangible
in its palpability of conscientious foreboding.

He breathes out and lets hands pass through
his chest like they belong there, nestled among
viscerae and sneaky stowaway fragments of
two fingers tugging at stiffly ironed shirt collars,
and he swallows— the taste of— of black licorice
sits on the back of his tongue like lead, the
taste of— of ablution beads like morning dew
and dribbles down his throat with every
second he lets pass, coiled up in nondescript

nonchalance like maybe they can just—
just. It’s a Weird Love. Drenched in emotional
obscurity that would make Aphrodite Urania
weep porcelain tears. He’s stuck in the thicket
of his own haste, boxed in by invisibilities that
elude him like Sunday Morning crossword
puzzles over burnt coffee and burnt toast and
burnt ego and just— just—

maybe he can move towards the horizon, emerge
from his self-pioneered exile of contempt; those
awfully lovely hands pulling him by the ribcage
and snapping each bone with a tenderness he’s
denied himself for so long.

Maybe there is value in contingencies that
overflow and overflood the basin, in khaki
pants and leather belts lingering lovingly
on the backs of chairs, in the awkwardly
contemptuous not-quite-right way they perfectly
slot together, elbows and broken ribs, the glimmer
of a morning thrush upending a black beetle.

Sitting by the Lake, Watching

I like to know a place intimately
through the soles of my feet,
crunching gravel like bags of
early morning granola packed for
a day full of adventures ahead,
traversing melted memories that
stick like smashed beetles against
the flat of my palm

(I didn’t mean to do it. That. This.)

I smear them along my forearm and
hymnal winds wrap around my
shoulders like a pashmina knitted
from sunsets and the slow creeping
slouch of Autumn that dips its fingers
into the bittersweet vestiges of August.
Pine needles on trees go soft with the
melting summer denouement heat.

They (who’s this omniscient “They?”)
say that if you stare into the sun for
too long, too lovingly, you’ll go blind.

I stare and stare until she’s dipped
below the supple curve of distant
dreamy mountains, erupting in a
cataclysm of smashing slapdash
embers, and I go blind with
renewed ambition.

Trembling in the Face of Progress

The diagnosis is chronic diaspora filtered
through the lens of a humble braggart of a bird,
a graceless abandonment of lucid dreams
touching upon the cornerstone of
lackluster self-worth.

It’s in the form of a fist in her own mouth pressing
down her tightly wound esophagus. It’s in the
dissenting opinion of the middle aged pillars who
construe her reality a little to the left. A crooked
painting, a dark oak frame, jilted of a childhood
partly by her own design, partly by others’ mistakes.

Nobody plans for the disintegration of grey-pink
petunias and daffodils, replaced instead with dull
fruitless weeds packaged into neat little parcels of
paranoia. Her skin is soft like the velvet
underside of a rose, varicose veiny with eternal
misuse and self-abandonment.

Fear grips the bird and she flies away;
To retrace a familiar familial lineage stirs fear
deep within the belly, a suckerpunch of
ouroboric guilt and shame, leaving scorch marks
of inconsistency down along her feathered
forearms.

Threats of blankness mock her so she mocks
it back first, before it can strike, leaving
value unearthed for the trade-off of
illusory safety. High in her nest of twig
and bone, the bird laughs, but nobody
listens.