Drenched in sunlight, the one time
the only time you believed love
you stowed away in the dust, the
white cubby, the industrial blue
history of corners, closets, and other
hiding places beginning with C.
Photograph: longer hair than now
everything faded, trying to be older
than you actually were, not knowing
the repercussions of skipping stones.

It starts with the moon - classic and sincere,
beating its cratered heart. You would live there
if you could. You would write all your letters
sing all your songs ruin all your loves
from a distance. If you could. But the moon
is the moon and we are only human sized,
human shaped. It is too good for us; it is
where it starts.

The moon, the moon. Your moon a ghost
shaking your dreams - whole trees, not leaves
until they move under your skin, lit up, on fire
the burning sleep, the heavy eyes, the choke.
Your love letters fire along all the wrong nerves
and your songs bandage damages that never heal.

It's not your wrists trembling so much as your
insides, inside the whalebone of you now
petrified alive. Immobile sentience, you can't
get the right person's attention in the dark.
You need the moon. Your moon throwing
itself over and over and over
the edge, snapping back at the last second
because like you the moon can't die.

Your body goes but just your body and then
it's not your body; it's remaindered stars,
the beginning of the curve of some other
planet, a storm of bruises that body
left behind. I hold you under the same moon;
I know you, same moon, old moon, half moon
at your shoulder, the night watch overtime
the only promise I learned to keep.

In our last life I told you everything.
You remember. I shadowed my way in.
Your face knotted, gnarled, twisted
ugly, perfect with action. Then me,
perfect with pretend, more alien by the second
backlit, sunlit until you knew me for who I was
supposed to be, the sun down, the moon returned,
the moon high, the moon low, it didn't matter.
A trick of stolen light, we didn't care what it did
so long as it was there, the light heist prolonged
still known
still ours. I told you everything
you remember.

Close your eyes. Hold out your hand.
Off-center contents of your palm, off
the side of the road, off
and on again you
hold out your hand
and close your eyes.

Coughed myself up out of a sound death just to hear your story.
Not that I haven't heard it before. Not that I don't know it
from the inside out. Not that it's new. But it's you, so yes
the rusted tin voice dragged out of the smallest birdcage you
could ever imagine. Raised a tiny wing, lifted a tiny head, blinked
impossible worlds under a mask of stormy feathers. I wanted to
ask you about the part where your mother left you and you stalled
Christmas for her well into February. I wanted to ask if all the
hearts made it worse, if it didn't matter that it was Mother love
instead of soulmate love, if like a car crash the most numerous
thing became cosmic with injury to the ten year-old mind. I like
to think children are more forgiving but it's not true. With a
grudge it's best to imagine the child with a sword rather than
a shield because he doesn't know there's anything to hide from.
I wanted to ask you about hiding, but all I had were more coughs
dropping as bombs to be decoded at a later time - perhaps when I
am actually dead after all. Anything else? Your open palm, your eye,
your eyeteeth, your tongue, your flair for spelling Good B-A-D, your
midlife backward glance down the mountain in which I do not feature.
Coughed myself up to hear your story. Was just as quiet this time
as every other.

Four names belong to you. One you would like to divorce
but they don't make laws for like that if you were never
married in the first place. It follows you, a moon-cast
shadow you'll never be rid of. The worst thing of it:
the name doesn't care. A one-sided relationship makes the
longest distance imaginable, and you know it because it's
you stretched brittle thin across it. You build the bridge,
are the bridge, sink as the bridge in the wind sneaking
weakness into your slats about how falling may be what you
want.

Name two takes responsibility, appropriates culture and
reinforces history - none of which belong to you but they
look like you and under this sun that happens to be enough.
What are you? Alien, I say. Stranger in the strangest
land man has every known. Dangerous too. But this name need
not run from guns or hydrogen scares. Its violence shakes
only certain buildings. Buildings transplanted, buildings
whose street names keep changing, buildings made precarious
because no one ever taught them what support beams are really
for.

Skip to four. Family name, bestowed not given; carry it on
your back with your head tucked down. Hide. The feline in
it would understand. Name of the mother, the daughter, and
the articulated spirit. Name of dead queens. Name of hands
smoothing over the moon dark dreams in a teal room. Name
dusty and scratched and skipping but still something you
refuse to let go. What if it's a door? You worry, you bite
the insides of your heart. And so what if it's closed? You
dig your heels in. A closed door is better than no door at
all.

Flowers are for girls but when you're not in front of a
window or over a puddle, you feel you could be something
not quite a girl. Not quite a boy either. There's been enough
appropriation for one life, you figure, but some similarities
won't be denied. Crying fighting bleeding shooting each other
in the back, in the throat, in the palm of a hand straight
through to live under the skin of someone misnamed, mismeasured.
Invisible you. Not the name you had in mind yet the name you
return to most often, the one keeping you violent at night,
warning tight during the day, a seesaw that keeps giving you
the sunrise and then taking it away again. The name is a map maybe
and You Are Here: back of the brain, sunken over a box of hearts with
still more names scribbled, scrawled, scarred. All good enough
to hurt.

It must be hard to love a lost cause. Wait.
I don't mean it like that. I'm not talking
about worth (for once) or effort (again.) I
mean it must be hard to love something you
recognize as dying, sober and smiling with
a stone in your chest.

Every morning the downward staircase, the
withheld breath, the bluster of the wind
wanting to be a storm but not big or sad
enough. Every morning necessity treating it
like a storm anyway; you give chase, throw
yourself up into its eye and beg for another
day, your ladder made of promises you'd keep.

Quiet wreck isn't he? It's like the crash has
already happened. This could be a silent film
black and white and blue underneath. Lost, I
said. And I meant it. But lost like the island
left discovered only by the sea, like the letter
burnt unread, like Peter at the window and alone.

I know you know
how bad it is.
You don't even
try
to tell me
it's not true.

Yesterday we spoke - the lost and the still looking.
He was tying back brackets of thorns. He was bloody
bleeding barely noticing me. I didn't mind. Almost
I could imagine the room he was in, maybe not even a
room, more like a drawer jammed shut to keep from
spilling. I told him to be careful. He waved.

Truth be told it worries me. This drawer of his.
What else sleeps in there with him? A bullet? Two?
A bedtime story? Your pulse? Or what's left of it.
Real love can give charity, but it can take it back
too. Yes it must be hard to love an antique, lugged
into a strange time, beautiful but always falling apart.

There's magic for this nowadays. You've heard; you've
heard a hundred times in several languages but your
head paints forcelessness as the ally, force relegated
to dark alleys and the dead true quality of midnight crime.
Rainbow pills, but he prefers rain so you give him rain, and
alright, true; he loves loves you enough to leave you behind.

Dreamscapes shove my spine through my front on a regular
schedule. It's nothing compared to this: the landscape of
your body curled around his. He could be a gun and you would
be the detoxing trigger finger. I say your name, his name,
your names together but nothing, I'm too late. He loved you
so much he'd leave you but you loved him enough you refused.

April Moon follows him by another name:
Diana, a dark-eyed whisper sleek as midnight,
the specific skip of an ever aging pulse
dictating, "Always you will have Almost"
and Almost always will never be enough
to catch her heading to the same home.

He tries anyway – visits wrong home
after wrong home, imagining her name
as a compass arrow, as magnetic enough
to guide like slow-burning stars at midnight.
Too slow: each endeavor has him only almost
there, where memories invent a phantom pulse.

Her name was Diana on the literary pulse,
Dawn when giving him a better home
to love in, Dear close to nightmares almost
darker than he was. And then Done with that name
lost, though Jack still eats away at their midnight
in past tense, because present wasn't enough

to soothe, not even to lie to himself, not enough
for the story he'd planned it to be: his pulse
stolen from the boy Diana left in midnight
in summer in the preteen of a safe place, safe home -
- now always going by an identical stranger's name,
which is (was) always almost Jack, almost his, almost,

but not quite; because everyone knows "almost"
is just the winning loser, just good enough
to make team and never place, to have a name
no one remembers no matter how hard they try, a pulse
if barely (beating, beating, beating) there in his home
where committed affairs keep stalking a Diana midnight.

Jack sends letters throughout the April midnight
moon, throughout the grey daylight, might even almost
send them to the right address, the maybe salvaged home:
his back a backdrop to the kingdom where really enough
is never actually enough. Instead it is the flat of her pulse,
a window slammed shut on the 35mm fingers of his name.

Yet even a crushed name can scrounge up some midnight
can provide some kind of pulse – a deadbeat in black almost
poetry, almost enough, almost the truth, almost...home.

 Woke out of the dark, out of attack.

            A hundred years ago I crash landed

                headfirst into sleep, slept through

                the important parts, stuck around

    to see what was left.

 

Woke out the dark, out to find your grave but

They didn’t even leave me your body to

            remember you by. Lunar body, body

            strung out to drown in the earth light

    where you could be hiding so well no one’d

            find you. Least likely me. And so it was

 

        out the dark

out the light of the dark. Doubtless that what I

                                 wanted

was already dead.

 

 

Prism light your eye, prism light yours.
Boxed bound tied with red ribbon.
Red is for fate
also love
also slaughter
also you
catcradled in the sick that hit you like a
train running away from the wrong guy
its headless conductor an equal opportunist
for prisoners. Fever bright, prismed prism
proposing remedy to be banged out on my
word because my wallet’s never been quite
as strong. This will work. It has to work. It’s
a modern world and people don’t need fairy
tales if they have science. We can fix this they
say. One more year, one more million, one
more lab rat more skeleton than skin. Here
take this
for now.
Hold on for us a little longer. Just like that.
Red ribbon prism, red light, earth light, moon
dark because the sun won’t share anymore.
Your violence lives quiet, under the surface of
a shackled sleep, trapped where you do
not want to be. Do not. You say. Do not. I won’t
I promise. Here let me sing you back to me
awake
one last time.

Slept, walked, walked in my sleep
right into EXTERIOR – POOL – THE
NIGHT WHERE NOTHING IS RIGHT
sputtered something I don’t remember
though I remember the sputtering part
also the water, chlorinated aqua staple
of Floridian living. In New York the poor
have tablets. Florida it’s pools. Idaho is
what you would expect: potatoes, real
estate cheap enough to live if you don’t
mind isolation, surprising with its fists
and its teeth, the night creatures being
the worst company to keep, dream you
telling sleep walking you how to do it
next time, saying Or Else fill in the blank,
plaguing and chasing until you wake up.
I wake up not Florida not New York not
Idaho or Michigan. Not a wardrobe either.
But I wake up, unsleep walk myself
backward. The scale lies, because it leaves
things out. All the time, forgotten, all the
middle distance of eventlessness. Failure
never hurts less but even hurt can be a
monotony, stuck in a rut they say in some
places, places like this middle distance,
middle ground hated, from which I spot
mountains and trenches, from which I
think they do not look so different.
Skyscrapers too made of moonlight oh
I must still be sleeping after all. One of
those. Walking in my sleep, maybe not
sleeping while walking. Can’t be bothered
to wake up and find out which I am.
Wouldn’t recognize me anyway. Dreams
are pushcart lies. I prefer the moon, awake
and watching. The moon alone so I know
she knows
exactly what I mean is not exactly what
I say and though there’s science for every
thing, I want to know about science for the
nothing, for the negative space, the states as
of yet unoccupied by the footprint someone
leaves to remind those who follow they
will never be first. EXTERIOR – YOUR PLACE
NOT MINE – STILL NIGHT, STILL DARK I
can't sleep walk around you it turns out.
I don’t trust you far enough to dream a
better version. Instead we stay awake and we
talk and here is the nothing I wanted but it
doesn’t last. I wake up. A dream is a scene
it turns out. Sometimes I have the same one
glass bursting in like a flood, cold bay air
fogged over with ghosts and magic reserved
for book shaped people. Walk through there
to find faces recognizable by touch only under
a half moon. They require half the dark to see by,
the sea by the light faked from the tower that
says once I faced fear dead awake, spiral stairs
black with holes and the ability to look down and
see too much. That’s what height is. In a dream
it may vary, height as a freedom, height as a way
to say there is no love greater than the love that
won’t drag you down with it, will leave you in
remainder shadows, spaces where even the moon
won’t go, spaces I’ve slept through so deeply I
didn’t know it except by the narrowness of breath,
the almost idled state, more quietly dying than
I thought I would. Sleep walk enough, off the side
of your fire escape, your building, your curb into
rush hour traffic or a cyclist who must have been
quite the warlord in his past life. Go trawling for
other people’s wants homes families dead and
living. You’ll get what you want
for a while.
You’ll get things you don’t want too
probably for longer. But maybe it doesn’t matter
if you lower yourself far enough, crouch in the sea
bleed out your rapid eye movement because now sleep
isn’t sleep anymore. EXTERIOR - ? - NIGHT.
And the camera keeps rolling.

It doesn't matter where you do it. In the shower
behind the door under your tongue. It doesn't
matter at all.

Instructions for diving: arms out, knees bent
and stay stiff as a board. Instructions for dying:
arms out, knees bent and stay stiff as a board.

Cake today but you didn't taste it. Neither did
I. Busy you know. Double checking my lies for
signs of psychopathy, running it by polygraphs.

Yesterday frozen fingers and toes, the wrong
clothes for it, the wrong state of mind for this
kind of weather, hurtling round each corner.

Tomorrow the tongue pressed down, stuffed
back into the throat or just the wrist kissing a
sharp corner trying to say love without a mouth.

On second thought though the shower might
be best. After all. Clean, considerate, easy to
get rid of, which is what you want. Right.

Well no. You want to be better for, cleaner
for, smarter for, prettier for, less mistaken.
You want what everyone wants. Almost.

A moonlit getaway, escaping the sun and
all that entails. You coming to a close
blowing a kiss goodnight.