cotardtheliving:

In Venice I dreamt
that you pulled a sheet over
our heads in the night
and poked a thousand holes inside
with a bloody fountain pen.

Your lips were like parentheses
around the word “silence,”
which posed a question mark
at the end of my name.

It all sounded the same
when we were coming
up for air, the dark stringing
holiday lights over
our shorn bodies, like a couple
of drunken convicts.

Look, you said, and pointed
into the void with fingers
thin as skeleton keys.

When I peered through
the white ceiling looked
like a paper galaxy, the holes
expanding and then trembling
like a person who has
very little left which they could lose.

They swung back and forth
like a spiral pendant
at the end of a hypnotist’s chain.

They were the eyes
of all the ones who have
ever loved me; they were
the eyes of all the ones
who have ever gone away.

For the first time in a long time
they made me feel safe.

thegreatestactor:

I was thinking
about you again

late

last night, my

legs drawn apart by
the magnetics of an

empty room, always

reaching

for refashioned memories
that unwind muscles

(so tight)

through the ebb
and through the flow;

through the shadows
of another

moon.

cotardtheliving:

On gin nights
when I fade from awareness
like a dial turned
slowly to the left,
the dreams shake me.

Our limbs separate
from us, and go hard
like widow children
throwing rocks into
abandoned buildings. 

In bed we make a Civil War
portrait, pale and damp
with blue-gray jackets
to protect us from the rain
that falls sideways across
concrete walls,
as if it were wax
dripping off communion lights.

The admirals give us
brass crutches
so that we can return
from the long battle
to sit drunken through
an absent mass, singing
praise for those foreign daughters
we worship when
we fear the price of true faith,
or the weight of years
we have yet to live.

For half a night we drift
in and out on cracked pews
and wake when the morning sun
pierces Saint Sebastian’s mosaic
with happy arrows.

There is a sudden prism
invading the stained windows,
and the dark with all
its precarious pinions,
so that it is impossible to tell
whether this thing is moving
nearer, or getting farther away.

When all the dead dogs trot in
from their divine alleyways
to impregnate the room
with naive light, the hands
on your brow are not your own.

Worry flutters crookedly
at your bare feet
like a tiny mechanical bird.

How many more days
should we wake to
the piles of baby teeth
that collect on the floor
beside our sodden boots? 

Why is she giving them
all back to us now?

Sebastian, with the stink
of old gin heavy
on his flaccid tongue,
reminds me that every hero
must grant the evil admittance
if they ever intend
to put it down for good.

Sebastian, with the water-
whistle of chapel breath
blowing through the
cavity in his breast—the closer
I get to you, the more
immeasurable the distances
become. 

I tug on your blood sleeve,
ask that we return
to that empathetic bed,
and let the sheets armor us
for the well-intentioned war
that we will start.

Toy soldier, I think it’s
high time we trade in
this pink kid-skin
for a costume
far more dastardly.

cotardtheliving:

There is a shadow
on the wall now
where grandfather’s clock
used to hang.

In February
the keys stopped winding
and the hands were made
absent by the hourless chimes
that gasped from
the wallpaper
like drowning men.

In my head I hear
every false tick
like a phantom limb
and feel gouged by the minutes
that just aren’t there.

The repairman estimates
another two months,
maybe three, but it’s hard
to tell how long that really is
when there’s no face on the wall
making eyes at me.

See, when you sit and think about it
every second is a mere degree
of how far we are
from the sun—an arbitrary
measure.

It’s God’s answer
to the age old question,
are we there yet?

“Well, kid, I really
don’t know.
I guess we’re there
when you decide
that we are.

But I’ll give you
a little tip: telling time,
it ain’t hard to learn.
All you gotta know is,
you’re too damn late
if you’re already burned.”

thegreatestactor:

    so
   s o o
  s o o o
s o o o o o
   s o o o 
     s o o
         so
          v
                e
                     r
                            y       b    o         
                                                 r    
                                                      i    
                                                         n
                                                               g 

cotardtheliving:

Sunday mornings, she’d stand
in the lighted doorway and ask me
how I’d take my coffee.

I remember this, like
many things that haven’t happened;
the image is yellow, and curls
at the edges, like a burned
scrap of paper.

In the spring she was afraid
to drop in on me far enough
that I could see beyond the silhouette
that teetered on the wall like
an open flame, beside the hutch

with the porcelain elephants
and the photographs of fathers
that we never knew.

They were soldiers. Some of
their raiment was green, but the others
were brown and wet
with the liquor that spilled out
through their open flasks, as they slept
in concrete trenches, the soot
tattooed on their listless mugs—bastards.
All of them.

I saw the black ceramic shake
from her hand
on the wall like a stuffed canary
fresh from the coal mine,
when she asked me, Milk? Sugar?
and counted the length of each breath,
waiting for her to slink back
into the other room. Confused

because the kitchen was the shower
was the bathroom was the mausoleum
where I had lain in bed
and watched her washing herself
the morning before.

Intimacy, then, was the off-white down
and the curve of her sex shifting
under her panties, as she scrubbed
the rouge from her cheeks
until the skin chaffed off
in pale, wintered flakes.

The snow on the windowsill
that morning was ash, though
it was April, and I knew
that I had never really been
in love with her.

I kept thinking that all lies
are really just promises
that somewhere went wrong.

But since she painted
the window in the bedroom shut,
a thought has never been
more than a suggestion.
It’s too stuffy in here for that.

So I tortured myself instead
considering sunny days
in the suburbs, when the cages
where stucco but smelled
just like home, and we spent our summers
dodging traffic and vomiting
our government rations in
the busy street for a laugh.

Our faces had already crooked
from perpetually settling on
the next best thing. Everything was
gawdamn this and gawdamn that.

The whites of her eyes were never
quite as fluorescent as they were
back then, when she’d crawl in
through my busted window and
move over me in the dark.

The first couple of times, I tried
to put a light on, but
she always stayed my hand.
It was much easier not to see
the bruises, even when we knew
they were right there, splayed
over our baby fat
like poorly hatched Rorschachs
teaching us all the things
about ourselves
that we never wanted to know.

They taught me that
I had always really been
In love with her.

I got up to open the window
just enough to let the dark out.
It was night and then it was day,
and then it was some strange memory
in between, and I replied,
Just the sugar, baby, but
she had already gone.