Relit

Our lives have been lived,
bodies changed,
candles burned and relit,
thoughts formed in cycles,
seasons,
snow ball fights and rivers swam,
fields found and favorite shirts worn thin,
forgetting so much, a compendium of words.
This place is a shelter, an opening
in what was walked away from.
Five year old emails
to grandparents that no longer live.
Six year old emails
to the girl who changed the life
you had.
Letters and notes, pictures,
paintings, poems,
parts of parts
of parts.
Sweaters lost beneath the bed,
shoes destroyed in forests of
fondness,
rocks skipped across ten thousand
miles of memories, getting smaller,
gaining distance,
slowly sinking
beneath the surface
of lives lived.
Broken bones, fractured hopes,
torn between doing and done,
moving on or moving in.
Poems are plaster casts of
the intangible beauty
existing beyond our
ability to truly share
the feeling of
"alive."
We're bound in them,
and deleted,
torn, trashed, tossed,
dismissed, dismantled,
edited, repurposed,
disposed,
and found.
We're bound in
lives lived,
binding in us
life of others
changed and
relit.

Natural Selection

Calculated.

Most of it is anyway,

after that moment of discovery

what some people call a first breath,

and others suppose it's the beginning of life

but the rest of us haven't been convinced yet

that we aren't really living amongst our own murderous

tendencies.

DOB, timed, stamped, and registered,

most of it is anyway,

and after that it gets really weird,

I mean,

it gets weird in this sort of

"out there in the world"

kind of way,

you were once apart of something,

now it's numbers, ideas of being, ideas of not being,

and actually not being.

But now it's mostly unexplainable,

bubbles in bubbles exploding reabsorption,

disintegrating reconstruction, like

the kind that weighs on you late at night

when enough wasn't enough and it's all

hidden away somewhere in that small

shirt pocket, right in front of everyone's

eyes, but you're a great distraction, maybe

the greatest one you'll ever be able to

present to the world, a card trick.

It'll be that way, we'll all be that way 

for each other, card tricks, shuffling ourselves

into new decks of disappearing acts,

blowing away in the wind.

It's mostly unexplainable because

it's mostly uncontainable, forgetting

diverging, selecting for and against

worth or unworth. 

The environment creates and 

destroys you.

What started / ended it

What started / ended it

Lapses & Threads

Sometimes we have these short lapses in the presence of our own presence, moments when we see the future, feel a person that we will love, who we have not met yet. We experience our own experiences prior to their realization, their moment of contact in our propulsion through time. Moments when we experience a life that is not ours but will be if we stay right here, always right here. These short lapses feel like pouring honey onto your tongue and discovering it again for the first time, waking up at four in the morning and seeing their face folded into a pillow, covered in moonlight and shadows, and our eyes feel reborn, like blown glass taking shape and cooling, like clouds creating thunder in the same way for millions of years. Rocks becoming smooth. Finally smooth.

After so many nights of moonlight and crashing thunder, these short lapses are our fingers wrapped too tightly with unbreakable thread. A thread that leaves marks, lines, cuts, and hope. We pull the threads farther apart, and reveal, and entangle, and soon the threads slice so deeply into our flesh, and become taught, waiting, praying for them to give, to snap, to fail, to open to us. And soon they weave patterns through us, into our bones, into our fears for what the future holds. Soon the threads hold us together, our skin gives way and the air that kept distance from the moon now keeps us from ourselves, still pulling, tearing, fighting against the threads. They're red. Thin. Sharp. Beautiful. Kind. They are tied in knots to our limbs and movements, moments. Our blood vessels are tiny eyes of tiny needles for tiny threads, weaving through our bodies, mapping, coiling, weaving, binding, we breathe them. We are threads, and others fight to open us, we're a lapse for someone in something and they can't pull us apart to see inside and soon we're tangled, and coiled, and chained on the floor, unspooled, unraveled, torn, sewn, complete.

S is for something known.

And all of a sudden relief
release

together

outside, the sound of sirens and sleep
inside, wounds have failed to cauterize, reopened.

Worthless chords, tuned to a noose.
A room full of noise, is your head, is your tomb,
is a surrogate interest to harvest the wound.

And the relief fades slowly

And nothing remains

outside, the wind heaves its chest
inside, shell pieces went missing, reopened.

Noise outside never sleeps, drowning in itself,
calling for us to leave the tuning pegs behind,

you can't hear the sound.whytryandfaildenylostandaloneandnoreasontosurvive.
But with your fingers, they breathe
Surfacing slowly
Shivers upon the neck

Stop listening.

Feel.

Not all true.

Immolation

Slowly, the fabric of optimism soaks through, my skin washed clean of pleasant, of that joy. Soaks through with a realization long denounced, robed in denial or disillusion. And one day, maybe we all will wake up and realize the best things to happen to us have happened, and now it's time. Blow the candles out, no one will be sleeping there, no one worth caring for, no one worth the might, the strength, the shaken earth, the calloused hand/heart. And the day that all happens, a new hope will awake, a hope that the road goes on forever so I'll never find the end, never have to return. And without a hand/heart to hold, I may as well color myself like the sun.

Copia

Find Copia, Eluvium, that's the one. Play it. Fill a bath with warm water and wandering ambience, let it sink through your temples and directly into the memories of / Take yourself back to the moments of obscurity, the shadowed familiarity and dense patterns of unspoken reality. Fragile and alone, six feet above the ground, encased in wire, cheap furniture, and the sound of late nights, ignorance, and constant / The comfortable territory of that which makes you uncomfortable becomes the very plane that shapes interaction, the known / the pleasant, yet feared / Find Copia, stare at the ceiling thirteen inches from your eyes, the paint meant to say nothing is a heart, something its own. Every night is spent with Copia, filling the thirteen thousand foot dome of darkness, closed eyes, star spangled spectacle / Filling the lungs with frequency, filling the heart with hopelessness, to love this is to never leave it behind, carry it with you, make it your own. That's the one, use it to build a wall for one thousand miles and never let them in, use Copia, your defense, your home, destroy vulnerability, create the ultimate space between the real and / Find Copia, hold close the tone of tenderness touched by turmoil, hold close the waste of friendships, hold close the strange fondness of familiarity, and then pour it into the fifty minute void of Copia, and be released.

haha/