The Devil’s in the Details

I sleep well alone.
Your ghost is just a texture on the walls now – a shadow,
the slow drip from a leaky faucet,
the loud – creek – when I try to tiptoe in the middle of the night.
My face is a Cubist painting.
It is what’s left when you examine every perspective but your own.
Is there a definitive before and
after?
How did you become this way ?
The grief rearranges your features until they are unrecognizable.
I’m scared you’ll never figure out how to put them back,
I’m scared it’ll be like assembling a puzzle with pieces from different puzzles.
I come home to yelling / or a fist / most night.
I want to live in the heart of that summer
the egg yolk in the sky / the whistling wind / whispering through the open windows / the cicada stilled nights / doused in whiskey.
The smell of smoke took three days to wash out,
I slept for eighteen hours,
You are still gone,
I am still here
and yet,
do my hands belong to me?

meditations on the first of another month in the same continuum

All my months are bullet / train to the end of / the year / and no one is waiting there for me / but myself / and I still don’t know how to be alright with that / all my laughs come out sounding choked / and strangled / like they don’t mean it / even if they think they do / and what’s the use again / when everything feels like a lesson in impermanence / the truth is / I would have sat outside with you all night / for every night of that summer / and every summer after that / if it meant we got to see another shooting star / together / if it meant we would be sealed in a pocket of fleeting burnout / and break apart in some other atmosphere.
I almost wish / I never hugged that first cigarette to my lips / the entire room smelled like / my mother / used to / and now I am a portrait reimagined.
I wonder if the moon will always hang so heavy / no matter what phase it’s in / and what window you’re watching it out of / and the girl / with the pearl earring / was looking at something over your shoulder / never right at you / only through / and somehow you knew this / too.
You knew everything / so you didn’t have to wait around to find it out from me.

Blissful Nightmares

You are putting me back together again like gluing a vase you broke at your mother’s house,
like fixing the hole in the drywall
You are moving like molasses,
like everything is a slow motion timestill,
and I break knives trying to cut through the tension
You know I care too much,
I still need you when I say I don’t, but I like to entertain what it would be if I didn’t
How easy it would be to walk out of your car
and not look back
How simple it would be to unlove you, if I were anyone other than myself.
But you know these are the worst of the nightmares.
I averted my sight from the moon last night
That kind of dripping darkness remains invisible even when you open your eyes
and keep looking
And then I became a dead thing,
And the wind was a home, like my breathe, both settlers of the land,
And I did not let the stray dog lick my scraped knees, but instead caged myself in alone
The trees are all immovable weight, quintessentially rooted in place
We have nothing in common,
You are a break in the sound barrier,
and I only want silence.