diamond & the rough

first let's ask what can i do for you? before balsamic taste
of there's nothing we can do for you permeates the glinting

tile six years and swelling of a workhorse bruise sunk by
& into craters of pennies piling. revolving door: pathetic.

pardon me for involving myself. i pushed you into asking
for what you want. the response: rustling of ecosure audits

& a quick return. guess i thought for certain life sometimes,
occasionally, when met with irrefutable claim, wrapped gentle

with ethic, hard-strung by fibers of refusing refusing refusing
to let transplants pull the plug on our little home by the hospital,

yeah i thought this shit was a given. was given to me with hardly
any effort. all it took was a hint and they emptied their pockets

into my bulging account. enemy so friendly. capital enemy.
every way i look people are standing. with twitching mouths.

expectantly. we expected thirty cents, god help us. and took
our time with the selling points. one, whomever walks away

from the register slightly shimmering. two, fucking infallible
corrections, barely registering. three, the loyalty one does not

see but feels, cold, unmoving, as once again the tiles gleam.
four, you forget who allows you sleep. forge forgiveness

from hands dripping red. i thought better of sudden mutiny.
you handled it well. better than i thought seeing your eyes

as they broke from the meeting. i don't know how to serve
the animal that hoards what you deserve. capital insufferable.

we breathe together. i am beside myself with you failing
to learn that nothing is given first without asking.

confession

(you are enough. you are enough for me. i am no longer searching. "battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won." and love is found in the same spirit that it is lost. an aching, a bruising, an abjection. i lose myself daily to giving. what i deserve is unfounded. a projection. if ever i deserved it was what i wanted most. to help you. to land in this place and meet you immediately. what troubles you does not trouble me. what scares you does not scare me. not because i am stranger to trouble or fear. but because since meeting you, for the first time in a long time, i look to the future. even as the world collapses. i have found that fear of the future is better than fear of no future at all. i have found. no longer looking. sorry for my public plea. (but you know me.) i am reckoning with a document, full of flawed gestures of love. reckoning this document to forge a music equal to the easy symphony of our being. a document obsessed with the facts of flying. lighter than. sweeter than. so that if something were to happen. and things are happening. no stranger coming across it would ever doubt. that i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you.)

leaving

that idiot emerged

                                           from his car locked                   out of the store

he didn't knock                  didn't know              did not think

                                                                        to ask you                    if he could show himself

here                     my house                     our castle                 this fucking place            


                                                                  i buried my face in hair

your          [         ]               is here


              and I'm                      gonna go  

                                                                              back door locked front door watched

nowhere to go                 but i'm gonna                                                               go


you said wait                                                                           (always      


                                                                                                                    waiting)

& came around the corner
                                                   with a sudden wetness
                                                                                in your eyes

which i can only translate                                                                   through body

                                    through kisses                       through spit and melancholy

                    you thought i could just leave

                                                                    you just don't know


he doesn't even deserve the title of                        [                                     ]

no  

                  but i know someone who does


   

murmurations

you over there

                             i right here

     working                                      through unthinking

                                   belonging                     if only for a brief moment

       to a shared uncertainty

                                                       that is certainly a miracle of faith

             one i can't pray to

            one i can't unspool

                              can't reverberate but through murmurations of your eyes

                                                                                         anointing me

                                                               with the sweet song of staying


i am leveraging this limitation into a prayer of please
i am unwriting all the anthems that landed in your disbelief
i am becoming the sort of man that knows success before it blooms
i am unstoppably glad to be any sort of sun in your feathered orbit

(the wound)

I fall back

              beside your memory, a rippling wave of smoke, insatiably rich

                                                & feeble. Ungluttoning.

             Running tongue splits into two concrete paths. The wind is like
                                                                                                                         lightning,

                                    not yet storm-worthy.

     What's it matter

                       which eyes hold us in tandem                                  and which see us spilt?

                                                                              Yr embarrassment.

                              My, my, my possession.                                                Going that way.



How durable our fact.

                        How plausible February seemed.

                                                               Manic grace: this eventuality.

& SO IT GROWS

woof. we carried our fragmented plans this far

          without much hullaballoo. the intentional delay of perfect...

                               don't even think about it! much less touch yourself. touch yourself

more. don't translate. the machine gurgles and doesn't want to bear the weight

                   of this inevitability. god, yeah, it gets heavy,

                                                                               & that's why i'm the carry.

this is the new fiction, fact. 

if you're new here? tell us what it is that you see.

                             did you see when i had her back? just by breathing

                                                                                                  i am sure
                                                        of an ecstasy                      barely broached
                                                        of a you of a me

of striking lines through the piling up of our eventual list of living
i am absurdly sure and kinda shaking for the two or three milliseconds i allow myself to doubt
doubt cannot allow the space choked of its needed talk so we say what we can say in ellipses
and arms around necks and brief honorifics and well who cares just come by sometime

                                & you will see how much i mean what i mean