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.

nooneknowsnothing:

Burning flame on my waist; 

like a prick on a fingertip you hurt,

like rivers of lava you burn,

like a rusty knife along the skin you cut,

the center of my youth…

And I hold out, I resist, 

despite the punches twisting my hips

or the pills (which I detest) with it’s remiss.

I stand firm on my time, on my own life, 

to keep the balance on the universe

and save the future sons of the Earth.