Hypnos

There are red shutters on the curve
of his past collisions – I don’t know what he’s doing,
the agitated consistency, the cleft uncollected;
I wake up and the first thing I do is remember the
accidental atrophy of his arm multiplying its weight
across the side of my body – whole dandelions of fingers
smashed into a fist that he’s shoving into the
mouth space of my pillow

A doe caught under the blurred sleeping pattern of a
boyish alcove shadow that screams
                                                           Advantage! Silhouette!
Mounds of bones
crept closer – between the cheats
the sapling reads rosen with too much sugar
keeping you unrisen, unrevealing the earth of
smoking September wood

His body bakes like bread and smells of sulfur,

The fruit. The rind. The slang and guilt ghost drum
to flatten me on irrevelation – I know your throat is dry,
Ὕπνος , you grumble at night and your stomach
speaks in slurs and curses, your gut has demands
and will not shut up— I cannot sleep—
I cannot go deaf to deterioration
or blind to how when no one is watching, you touch me
in ways that make me weak, you choose your words wisely
                                                             As demons usually do.

You’ve misplaced your country but
I cannot leave you and lose the perforation of my thread
attached to the wings replacing your ears,

Hypnos. You must take me with you.

Dark Labour

Hope
Is where it all goes wrong

Without closure, love
Is as mute as matter
and movement in any direction may displace lines
That hope has idealized –
The science of parallels that one or more people
Are too stubborn to realize revolves around the
Space between your zodiac and a caravan of
Monsters left living lies inside your throat

Who is left to guess whether or not his heart
Conceals a comatose flame – unhealthy knees
That grow twelve times their measure
Every time I pray between your legs, at your feet
Hungering for a mouthful of bone to break my teeth

This hope

The deprivation of sleeping without worry
When we occupy the same space and mirror
Breathing patterns – I would have loved living
Near you as a giant, swimming in the damp fog
That screams and creaks away from your spleen

The unhealthy sun. The nightmare of dialogue.

I never weep, I never laugh, I travel on tiptoes
Through the unconsciousness of truth –
Dragging the swan from its cage and
Bathing its wings in small rivers of dark labour
and dust

Hope.
How fatal a myth

Buzzards

There are buzzards being sucked
Into your teeth

Panicking words – paraclete and prairie hair
Both lost in translation,
I stare at them and the prologues that slide
Across your lips

Slide
On axis, centripetal, polar scales devirginized
Without shifting rulers – I skim by with a pocket
Of planets and a fistful of coins that
Exaggerate the depth of humidity you leak
Into my muscles, my fractured cusp peaking at
Tongue tied knots and harem, déjà Senti lure me
Into static palms pronounced like the way I
Can’t help but repeat your name
          over    over    over    over    over
                and     and     and      and

Loft, middle, black manifesto, Leo entitlement
Altruistic propaganda and you seize sleep
Like a common cancer

and I analyze the distance you place between
Our bodies, as if I am pox, plague, resistance –
It’s all you. The fragrance thickening the empty
Space you’ve created as if Virgo protrudes
The air and holds it hostage waiting for us
To give an answer

Your scent is a hundred rural Sundays
Lodged in my throat

1995

I can feel the heat from the sativa
piling in your cheeks – stagnant blush aggregate
of all the weeds that implicate your tongue

Count them
          One, two, three

Sudden hands!, sugar smack, trail off
your eyelid comma coma for hours –
I swear I recognized rearranging diction
in the way you slid through your sentences

A pin prick, a kneecap, every picture since
1995 – I kept thinking of you being lost
inside a church

Demon
b-line, bark
there’s a fifth of filth where you’re hiding with the owls

and the smoke replaced your hair
covered in walnuts, dry and on fire
giant legs that boulder state lines,

In neon, you are a ghost

I saw it in you once. The backdoor that
leads out into the timber, footsteps crackling
correlating ebony on a trip to the past that
believes it has found the only way, a scent
much sweeter / styled from molecules of rott

Blonding Virginia,
there is a death here, in slow motion.