p: 10.21.09

it bothers me
you're a story thief
and traipse along parasitically

I can't mind the question mark.
It's a shadow with more than twenty years' history.

don't try to gift me
with relatives after
a sifting through pasts
still comes up blank

If you can choose the convenient,
I'll choose to be an artifact:

dusty icon from dead language
village of vanished people
sliver of petrified wood in yr eye

p: 10.21.08

Famous for its own sake:
O that must be pretty

A kind of circular logic
Where ostentation's the object

And beneath all the decorative
Is blank stagnant space

That smells like the air in a tomb

p: 10.21.07

You shimmer with lack,
its lustre is blinding.

Trips and traps that promise gold
end in dead-end holes.

You are pretty, but it's
an undelivered promise.

I wanted your viscera
to shine just as bright.

p: 10.21.06

guess I'll find out when the way
that this rubs is apparent
I'm skinnier sinews than ever
a tall tree to be knocked down
by hollow winds whistling up from inside

p: 10.21.05

capacity for survival
volume for existence
burned kettle
blackened throat

I would have more
than the fuzzy wall of
my reflection
in your eyes

p: 10.21.04

things that
have moved me before slide backwards
and I wonder if I've grown
steel for bones, like other folks.

but when
the fluid of empathy jostles my organs
I move to wave my arms and
still the waters, like Jesus.

can I
make up my mind, or will I
straddle the line always?

p: 10.21.03

paradise is an entrance to guilt feelings
it's preposterous to assume that pleasure come without price
I love fucking you, but the pulse in your eyes grows weaker

please. plurality won't leave, isn't just a phase,
someone else's dead moon on the purple horizon

I'll leave, again and again, for the plush of a different person

I'm playing you like a piano and the keys are hot as hell

t: 10.21.02

Swollen with sad -- it's clenching my jaw and haunting my head with you, and hollow sounds like echoing hallways -- this won't work out, it's all soggy wood and termites, I can't afford time for rebuilding. This house moans like old bones, clattering together as they knit faculties to rise.

t: 10.21.01

He has clinging spiders for hands and they are building slender webs on my limbs and torso. I'm annoyed, they're messy and they weave us together -- everyone sees them and I feel like an imprisoned fly, though I know I'm not. I'd like to scream at him, "No. Not ok. Not fine to just tangle me up in sticky webs of claimed territory. If you weren't insecure you wouldn't need to throw your safety blanket of fibrous affection over me like a net."