so long, lonesome.

Like an electrified city, she writes her tune, in cursive, all over my body— don’t blink, so you can walk wearing nothing but flame.

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway it’s the same old story— a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind.

We are the skeletons in our closets. We set ourselves on fire for the things we can no longer say.

The first time I heard my name in your mouth, the ground felt like a language I haven’t spoken in years. I forgot everything I knew about gravity.

I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.