it was just red

Tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing

I am obsessive. I contain nothing but the replay. / I am blood and blood and replay.

GOD DIDN’T JUST CRUCIFY HIS SON — HE INVENTED THE WOOD.

Your words carved bullet wounds into my chest and the wolves that sleep in the forest of my heart howled as they bled the colour of nothing. You once asked me if I had a name for the monster that lives in my head. I do, I said. I named it after you.

In my dreams, you are gravel-faced, bloody-mouthed, you are angel-eyed. Loving you is disgusting and familiar.

a prayer. the kind of violence that only exists inside the colour red,                                                           but you’d know all about that.

Let us no longer wake up sweating in a summer bed. Let us never eat grapefruits from each other’s laps. Let us stray quickly into this Garden of Sleeping Alone. This Garden of Heartache has found itself a labyrinth inside me. Let this be easy. Let this be the last time my heart is wrong. Let his hands not surrender up my thighs. Let him not unwrap me. Let him not find in me a new body again and again. Let him not love me. Let it not be so.

1 So, it’s morning. Or maybe afternoon. There’s light pouring through the window and it’s got you looking the kind of haloed and soft you only see in movies. I’m only half awake but I’m already writing poetry about your eyelashes, can you believe that?   2 In the mirror, I pretend to watch myself watching myself brushing my teeth. Instead, I watch you run your hands through your hair: again and again and again and again. More than once, I’ve seen the way you try to rearrange your body into negative space. Like one of those optical illusions— the vase with the two faces. You forgot you could be both of them. You forgot that when you lean too close to a work of art the whole picture blurs and disappears.   3 A new painting: one with no negative space. You as steady hands and solid ground. You with a ukulele and a dog. Coffee and cayenne. Cheap wine and expensive whiskey. All that blue in your closet. You as the perfect first date and something soft to come home to. Bad jokes and good intentions and all that— light.   4 Yes, light. Listen, so, it’s late. Or the time of night some people call morning. It’s dark in the car, but you laugh— I mean, really laugh. The kind that catches you by surprise and crinkles up the corners of your eyes—and it’s like a camera flash in a windowless room. It’s the best thing I’ve seen, all day.   5 Every morning, the sun has to relearn how to outshine you. Sometimes even she is not bright enough.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.