It is The ass end of November when the wind has left the night barren of leaves and branches try to mend the distance between stars.

Cigarette burns edge around the wrecked veneer. Your eyes hide in their scrutiny of the dusty curtains, what is out there beyond the pallid cast of the porch light. How great the distances bodies travel to feel the slightest gravity.

The scrape of the wind shapes the void we drift in. I remember wrapping my hands around you like an apron but the old transistor awakens with a sob of static. It had been forgotten after the trail of a stray broadcast had been lost. A glow that long since burned out. 

 

There is no point polishing the chrome that hasn't rusted off, the slant six still leans into the desert. There were too many mistakes to sift through. The easy lesson is to keep breathing. Even as the rooster tail rises behind dust caked taillights. Something like a comet that will never come back around.

There was too much dust; the accumulated fallout of what i didn't say. The way dreams flicker like fluorescent lights long before they die, the staccato death throes of a pulsar. Somehow we met in spite of the dust of exploded stars in our genome, the inborn weight of distance. These collisions never really altering the momentum of escape

.

I watch your mouth

open, the bud of your tongue

rooted to your hips. There

is no ambiguity in the

ambition of my mouth

seeking salt. With the memory

of stigmata your palms

press into the thorny crown;

you are anxious to pull the blood

from me that will

darken the rose.

I will write my desire

with the stain of my life

on every piece of you.

Under the wide eyed sky I would

break the seals and drink

deep of the violence

of your heart. I will rise

to die again in you

.

The soap soft machine of your hand,

willow lithe and needle strong

would collapse me. The bridges

are already burning and ready to

confess every suicide was pushed.

It is supposedly voluntary, you accept

the light when you walk into a room.

A heave of breast catches a stream

in the flood of fluorescent light,

lustrous through the dark dance

of your hair. I wade in hoping

there is land to be lead to.

Leaves burn, drop into ash, and scatter.

The music of death spiraling, sometimes

a buzz saw grinding far away; sometimes

the pregnant pause of a barometric shift.

But it is always about the creases

worn through and how we tear ourselves

on the failed edges of the past. I will

hold a match outside of this season until

you need a flame to dance around burning

like a wick licking a paraffin heart

.

Took half your head

and all your heart but

no matter what you stole

there was never enough

to sew it onto your sleeve.

Your faith never

questioned all the happy

endings locked into place,

bullets in the loaded chamber

of a gun. 6 chances to hit

something; more if you

kept the change. Anything

is easier to hold onto if it

has holes in it

.