I've been collecting sycamore seed skeletons lately. Pulverized, delinted and outlined all just today, take a look.
/ouroboros/
Your shadow lives rent-free in my mind. The sky is spilling cantaloupe and I'm on the terrace my entire being aches. Roots confined. Potted plants. Leaves trembling with the weight of the rain; twinkling fairy lights tangled above like trapped stars.
Biblically, I drift in limbo. My brain still pink, hot with want. This worship be building anarchy in its own members.
Is your bedroom ceiling bored? The double bed yawns before the torridity of midmorning arrives, but you aren't here. I've stayed up late, whispering to the freckled moon, asking if she carries your echoes too. I memorized how many times you rolled over when sleeping, and you told me what I talked about in my slumber. The redolence of your prickly hair. Like before.
Is your bedroom ceiling bored, like mine? Of you staring at it all the time?
When I finally descend into the lake, like a Norse pagan funeral — smoke spirals into the sky, vessel drifts silently, shielded with chrysanthemums. A North star pendant wrapped around the decapitated middle finger.
No hands or mouth skimmed over me. Only scalpels, cold and unfeeling, examined secrets from my flesh. An autopsy of my despair. But it's alright. Now I'll sell your blush and move to some Belleville. Fade out on the ride. Bang-gaon will wither beneath the weight of gypsy jazz and glitter-brushed roses. Sometimes, mist rolls over Jane Smith, 2002-2024, and we purge in the bushes.
I took it personally, yes. Because I would’ve never done it to you. Reboot to that summers’ time. Knapsack cola popsicles and Sanrio Instax highway photographs. Anyway ( 0). I love the taste of rust; I sit in the second-to-last seat on the back-right side of the bus on my way to the Sanso garden, 64-bit software coming down.
Anyway ( 1).
Exiled from the sanctum, yes, but come stand in the kitchen while I cook for you. Jalapeno chicken poppers and 2 annoyed oesophagi. Did you know they went by the name of armadillo eggs post birth in Gun Barrel City? Anyway ( 2). Sit at the counter and narrate foolhardy animal fables while I chop peppers. Trespass a little. Let the scent simmering on the stove bring us back, for a while.
You feel like microwaved leftover pizza. Or maybe like reheated french fries. Alright, cold pizza is fantastically fine — flavours settled and comforting. But reheated fries ( who does that?) lose their charm you know? Limp and lifeless. Why do you have to be the latter?
Anyway (3).
Last week, I drove with the windows down, no destination, listening to Smoke Signals by Phoebe Bridgers. This week, it rained a lot. Grey clouds suffocate the sun, heavy bellies pressing down, squeezing out every ray until we have a good wet canvas.
What do you want? Freedom or control? I buried a hatchet, it's sprouting lavender. The once-fat purple figs wrinkle and blacken, plopping one by one at my feet. The Kansa singing bowl was never brass — just jelly. Yes jelly. Like the Jell-o castle in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, but it never rained burgers and awesome sauce carbonara. My mutating food replicator chowplopper never dropped sentient food from the sky. Still, whenever my mind isn't occupied with tasks, I wonder what it would feel like to be somewhere else — someone else. The person who lived in my body 3 years, 2 years, even 6 months ago, is a stranger now. Yet time feels like a flat circle. My safe house is as flammable as ever.
Truth falls from my eyes like a rainstorm, flooding the castle we moved into together. Watery grave much.
(Why is everything so damp down here? C'mon. Get better symbols.) I tell myself natural disasters are fucking normal. Until you can't recover from the water damage — until the walls mold and eventually crumble, and the once sturdy beams snap under the weight of it all.
Do I show you my wounds or keep drowning them out? Do you want me to be the one to pour the kerosene, like always? I've a pile of unfinished poems in the back of my throat. And I'm choking on yet another truth — that you'll be one too.