Cartography, in Brief

Delicate, bending easily to your clutch. Impressing fingertip maps in my skin, pressing so hard because it is so easy, so easily one may destroy softness. Like nothing. Like wind passing by, us watching the moon eclipsed in dark fields. Because our world overwhelms and blinds us from various light sources. Lamp light is allowed, from a distance, to draw shadows from our tapping feet. Skipping across chasmic sidewalk cracks, pressing our white palms together because, full of weightless terror, we await our mothers' inevitable deaths. Because our palms weigh down with sweat, a solvent that like time makes this embrace a simple moment, an impress of fingertips.

Remember the Castle

If we lived in a castle, buttresses and stain glass cast in yellow moonshine, warmth slipping away through stonework, darlin you and I could slip. If the castle were big enough, we could see it from the places we wisp through, and remark to one another, remember the castle where we lived? But eventually we will reach a place where we do not remember, and it is no longer the castle we lived in, it is only a castle, cold, empty, not a home.

Mutual Reassurance

Saying something worth saying isn't worth saying when a struggle in the dirt leaves a reminder of falling in black crescents under your nails. When raising a middle finger reveals your weakness. When showering does not help, and you must clip away and discard parts of you, flush them from sight, to keep appearances. Unsure if this has helped or merely seems to have helped, you must shake hands, shake a hand and when you are finished shake another, firmly, to reassure yourself while you wait.

A Place of Forgiveness

Must I be clever, caked in mud, cold. It is degrading. The things I feel when I lie to sleep. You'd never know. Not you whose clothes are clean. It is easier to run in clean clothes. So do not think yourself clever. Knowing there is nothing worth saying, knowing the mud is the attrition of us all, all our last stand, softening our fall. So keep being clever, but in the place of the things you say, think about all those blank goddamn bible pages. Think about those pages, buried in dead seas as dead as scriptures of forever and ever, just think about all those dogeared hymnals screamed with the deepest hate for fathers who did not cause all the fuckin cancers and pain and the time we all need so so much more of, though nor could they prevent it. They stand a brittle wall divorced from sin and weak of flesh, and we hate them and we tell them we hate them, because we are too brittle and weak from the chemo to tell the Father of all our fathers to fuck off, though we want to and we are bitter with words in our gut like bile. We get off on fantasies of ourselves in some dirty desert town sucking to the butt and letting smoke trickle from our lips, our eyes never leaving His. Hairless as we came. Riding nausea, a mustang taking us God knows where through the dry brush. Mud under our fingernails. Everything we touch stained this way. Wanting reconciliation but first revenge. Blood of our Father, our own blood, a fine mess it is. Morning comes with drowned and bloated bodies floating downriver, who know there is nothing worth saying, washing up on muddy banks under the rainbow. From some storybook without words. And here, on the shores of dead seas, wearing mud on our clothes and under our nails, nothing to say, we can forgive.

You were the reason I cried at my friend's brother's funeral

Heard someone say one time, don't say goodbye. Some good advice, for how will I say goodbye. I'm not sure. If only some mail truck could hide me for a time, in the swampy night. I wish I didn't have that dream about you trying to hurt me with a fork, it isn't how I think of you. I wish we talked more. If only some mail truck could shade us for a time, in a front yard somewhere. We always wanted the best, we were always quiet about it. Sometimes we get angry, too. There are days I drive to collect debts. Burned my hand with your cigarette one morning on the raceway infield, tongue rough from coffee burns, skin sunburned, eyes burning. Like nitrate. It's fucking stupid that we don't talk more.

The Things Between

Sky so white the eyes erase blue, red, orange, black, green, grey, from memory, from the atmosphere, from life, from death, from sunrise, from sunset, from the centers of pupils, from the tops of hands, from reflections on white gold bands, from afternoons, from rainstorms and beaches in wedding dresses, in nothing at all, in her, in love, in between, thighs, legs, fingers, pale, slick, sky so white atomic shadows of nudes genitals pressed together on the walls like hieroglyphics, explicit, pornographic, sky so white erasing everyone but two, bodies obliterated to particles and images, to essences of feelings, of an aftermath, a decimated pile of flesh melted onto a pile of sheets, sky so white, the eyes erase the ground beneath, gravity, cities, worn mattresses, stars, and the things between.

Applied Geometry

It is difficult to remember, is it not, is it not difficult to remember where digging through the bramble will end. It is difficult to see, looking up with thorny constellations to lead us north, where will it end. Wipe the frost from the window, a single swipe of vision, watch for me to emerge. Remember and I will remember you. Wait for me, you have a home with a window to keep in the candle light and to stop the cold and I cannot stand yet but to stand implies leaving and if I stay beneath the bramble and you stay behind the window we are point and counterpoint and perhaps someday I will emerge but that day, that day when I will stand on my own, and it is difficult to remember, we will not say goodbye because our juxtaposition will have us facing opposite directions and it will be difficult to see, whether it is north, or it is not north, and this is what our Lord must have thought when he lay a broken pathetic liar in the eyes of the one he loved. So you see, it is that you feel my absence on the tips of your fingers when you clear winter from the pane, and it is that I will imagine the candle casting shadows across the snow, and that the pattern we draw will not melt for some time.