GET YOUR CROWNS WHILE THEY'RE HOT

did the sun ever feel like the sun should? were we ever really sick? could we ever trust anyone's answer? let me leave a bald patch on this lawn and rake up the dirt from my nails with my teeth. if there is a name for this flavor don't tell me.

spun on minutes of bruised matter raw thumb skin hashing against loose cotton fiber, busted lips from temperature flux; a taste is only a taste today. spitting fruit pits over the rails of the dam, our concrete bowl of echoes brawling blunt smoke to paranormal proportions. everything of us scuffed but shoe soles. in favor of black on black painfully simple, dull beasts at bay, joints wed to winter notes. pause drawn. raw thumbed. spit in the eye.

the girls are in saturday short skirts on the monday night after easter, toppling like pillars erected to praise well drinks and 24 hour jack in the box. everyone is on fire. everyone is buzzing and rubbing tusks and boiling beneath pleather swaddled nylon. everyone is red with an all encompassing gnashing of fangs against a glass wall. everyone is fucking themselves under some net of sonic violence, no one gets what they want but there's a surplus of alternatives so we feast.

princes at 23, clean cut with dirty nails. smoking with white teeth and a fucked up family you'll never have to meet. broken in all the easy spots. receptive to song and grin-cloaked resistance. holds you down your eyes are lifting, watches you reach the clouds and smiles about it when you're not even looking. princes at 23 are tides; they come and they wash and leave the gems among the beer cans and crab bones. but they go. cloaked in resistance. clean nails and a smoker's lung and a cheap hair cut. princes are moments, decent men with stellar timing.

we are the guilty fingers that ruptured the yolk, unwise to the ingredients that define reinvention from gratuitous destruction. we greet every day with the sensory fixation of a blind child with a grand reach; nothing left untouched, unturned, unshaken. molecularly predisposed to splinter the trajectory of existence.

there's a geometry to hunger and edges to inches, folding summer to kiss the back seasons, lining up candles and burning dead herbs trying to conjure an old feel, lunar palms sweeping to snag phantom waves.

the calico nature of transcoastal lust let loose and lost to the winds knocking in to bully sand dunes to hasty hands crawling back to the wash of twilight tides gulping. but still pride is greater so I can't even look at you to acknowledge this moment.

I was made of onyx and sugar and red dusk and rust and fixating guardians and dead skin and new nails and my mother's floating rib and my grandfather's legacy of obsession and twelve bent quills and sixty-seven fingertips aged in clove oil and upturned ankles and pyramidic aspirations and lead and fox fur and a titan's desire and a beggar's hunger and a wasted night and forgotten incantations and dove's tendons and suffocated desire reanimated and gin and waiting unrewarded. I was made.

sweet mother mary and the holy honey of this milk; a wide bowl laid before us. we are to be humble and drink nimbly. we let our gifts linger and roll on the tongue; no hasty slurps or disruption of divine placement. we bend to drink. we don't lift. we don't stir.

death is on my mind in the hills, bare. the vultures or buzzards or hawks, the mangy, winged, and malnourished, forging a halo between us and the sun.

she's washing dishes and water has never been so violent. she hunches and the scowl cut from porcelain sears through the back of her hair, the throat is getting tight. you might have brought this on.

now why would you offer anything to a winded heart? only disaster comes from humoring the desperate because the desperate are too parched to recognize desire. with sights set on consumption, reverence and limitation are rarely present company. soiled chin and glazed eyes drunk on rich profusion, the exasperated heart seeks only to gorge on any offering. reverence, reciprocity, and limitation are scarce company to their inner workings.

the dogs are sniffing at my dress, reds and tearing, moon and circle webs in frayed branches. I can smell mountain misery ride wide through the room on a mouth temperature current through the window. red and tearing. clavicles caving, the dogs are sniffing. the sweat on my back is turning cotton to lazy flesh heavy and wrinkling, chaffing. they're sniffing. and red and tearing. he keeps a wood fire burning every night, even under the dead of july, he likes the smell. likes how it sits on the tongue and flavors his diction. clavicles caving. the dogs are sniffing. red and tearing and the arrow gripped, and the blade sinking, the hammer cocked, the matchbook pursed. he releases them. he shakes the violence loose from the skyline and shows me how we all bleed the same. red and tearing. red and tearing. red and tear in the bed we share. in the bed we're sharing.