skeletal

love letters, missed connections, and uneasy vehicles smoking in the plains somewhere distant. you gnawed my ear black n blue and my frightened doctor tried to diagnose it melanoma, but there's no use counting yr eggs before they're hatched. counting yr books before you've read them.

pretty is kind of a mystery, but for its oh-so-handy appeal. sometimes i want a second shot at every conversation, at every encounter. i want to collect checks from all sides, past and present, so i can spin like a whirligig spewing out payments of my own. i can't believe how old you are, and how young. i can't believe what a tease i am. (cousins agree.)

the skeleton, the sky. the perversion of an ideal that is already, admittedly, by virtue of being an ideal, subject to incompletion.

to flaws.

a toast!

spread yr legs like pages of a book and i'll read you bedtime stories. crawl on softly-bruised knees to the edges of yr own allegorical devices; show me you can pick dandelions with yr toes and i'll subscribe to yr infrequencies once and for all.

i don't know. i'm tired of all these stupid games, but i can't seem to shake free of their intoxicating grip.

maybe the secret is to never step back.

misanthropy

i am the most antisocial person you know. (i'm trying not to know you.) i'm ready for my close-up. i'm drawing in sharpie on my limbs. the more invitations i get, the more likely i am to stay home and bury my head in the sand. can this world be a little smaller please? i get dizzy thinking about the sheer scope of things sometimes, at work when i lean my cheek against a window above a swarming street, above taxis bikes crosswalks carhorns miniature paintings of lives and i get out of breath cuz i can hardly remember my own name anymore.

and after weeks and years of not sleeping we start seeing ghosts out of the corners of our stumbling eyes but still we can't refuse these revelries that appear out of nowhere and sneak their way into our ears - parties where we hide in the basement pulling fuses till the art kids disappear; storefront libations and dancefloor hijacks; glazed sugar desires. she gave me shots of whiskey in line for the bathroom, and someone threw bottles to shatter in the street by uniformed feet. they switched jackets and asked me to climb up to their rooftop, but tonight i favor the smell of saturation.

finals week, finality, finally.

these last few days i've overdone it on stimulation and syntax and lack of sleep; every muscle in my body is jumping and twitching, and i'm losing my trains of thought as fast as i pound them out. but soon i'll be done with this didactic regurgitation, and i'll wish you were here so i could grab into yr hair and smell yr neck and slow everything down just a little, just a bit.

right now i can't remember life without speed and caffeine and insufficiency - everything smells like extremities, and this trip down south to empty ourselves out over yr memory will be a different sort of draining, a different sort of refilling, after all. i'd like to stand on a street corner with a sighing fiddle in my hands and all the sadness and sweetness of the world in my face as i coax a song from squeaky strings, so that maybe that would mean something about the way we'll choose to miss you, could mean as much as dark clothing and tears, as much as a bottle of wine in a bag between my knees. remission, reclusion, reform(ation). re-re-re-vival.

(which one of us is falling into disarray?)