never ask a poet anything

and I could have stretched my ribs like rubber to hold you, too.

I know there is a space in your diaphragm that glows like a window to a warmly lit room.

The only time I ever saw Julian cry, he was lying face-down on the bed with his arms at his sides like a child who drowned. I would never see him like this again, and that fact pains and delights me in equal measures. I would never witness if he cried alone in his apartment, minutes from oblivion, counting the seconds to his suffering, tallying marks on the coffee table with his library card. I do not know if his guitars twang-echoed his wailing like shouting into a cavern, waiting for his voice to return back to him.

We kneel at the altar of the subject, begging absolution of the form we take.

I want your kiss to be forgiveness. I want your fingers to cleanse me, to purge me of what I am.

I want you to find sanctity and godlessness in my skin, and I want you to rid me of both.

Love is clinical. It is an examination of our many parts, poking at what is bruised, bending the limb to find where it hurts, the root of pain, the measure of it. Love is autopsy. It is diagnosis.

One of the first true fears I ever harbored was toward tornadoes.

Utter power. Infallible. Impartial. Entire houses are ripped from the earth and set back down again with little regard for where they were to begin with.

I lived in Southern California, where the wind never blew harder than twenty miles per hour. I saw an episode of a storm chasing show when I was four. In it, a cow stood completely still in the face of the EF4 that drilled into the earth mere feet from its pasture.

I never understood that - why, on those programs, you never saw horses running when they heard the booming rush of the wind, the same way that a deer stops in a car's headlights. The oblivion that faces them simply doesn't register. And why would it? We don't run from a gust of wind. How could they know the strength of it, distinguish its might from a gentle breeze?

During the peak of El Niño, when I was nine years old, a tornado warning was sent out for my county. I was awake in my bed, hearing the winds stronger than any I had ever known crash against the glass of my windows. For the first time, I knew that the earth could kill me, and that it would hurt, and the monumentality of that realization hasn't shaken me quite the same since.

But then I think of you. I think of the counterclockwise devastation of you. I think of the uprooting of my garden. I think of the drawers you left empty. I think of the chair you broke. I think of the trail of wreckage that formed a near-perfect line out of my house.

I should breathe the filthy air you expel.

I should run into your light with the fierceness and abandon of a kamikaze pilot.

I should feel the breath of your brother so I can find the overlap between you, measure the space between love and indifference.

I will do nothing instead.

My dreams are vast and vivid. I've always hated sleep because I've hated dreaming. On occasion, the old machine upstairs will conjure up something pretty - a nice girl to sink my hands into, a flash of a house in San Francisco I can't recall the details of when I'm awake.

Mostly, though, it's something old and frightening and ancient. My dreams breathe, though that may be because I am more dream than man. I have to wait for the prestige, the revelation of the trick, the pull of the rug. I yearn for the moment that I wake up, for the resurfacing.

I wonder, though. If I am unlucky enough to not live an interesting life, to die at 95 in my bed alone, will I dream before it?

Let me tell you about God.

Let me tell you about God, because I like talking and you want to listen.

You want to listen. You do. 

Not because I’m making you, but because people who read poetry are the same people who like to yell about God, his presence or absence, all the names he has and all the names he doesn’t have. 

Carly ______ is dead.

All very sad, yes, yes, forever fourteen, sweet like tea in Texas.

At the eulogy I wasn’t there for, her mom spoke about God. I never heard the eulogy, nor read it, but she spoke about God, as if bringing him into the room would make everyone forget why they were there.

God could have stood in front of Carly’s mother and asked her what she wanted more than anything. Neglecting to breathe life back into the lifeless mass of tissue before her, she would ask that Carly go to heaven.

I know this. He probably told me in a dream, or in the sound of running water.

The problem with Carly, she would have said, outside of the hands in the night that raked on her, outside of the bullet casings in the backyard and the extra pairs of shoes by the front door, outside of the scratched leather in the backseat and the paper-buried-razors in the bathroom, was that she didn’t let the Lord into her life.

She was praying for her. She was. 

A Godly household. A household with God in it. That must be the nicest kind of house there is. Every house is a church, I think. Actual churches are just nicer houses, clean enough that we’re proud to host God in them.

I had a dream about Carly a long while ago. She called me Bumblebee, and I called her Vamps, and it was a November night in San Diego, where there is no winter, and we might have been singing karaoke, but we were also at a truckstop. The only way I can see her now is in fragments, places where she doesn’t belong, which is everywhere. 

The problem with Carly, her mother said, because I know she said it, is that she didn’t let God in. She bolted the door shut, like her bedroom door, hoping that whatever was on the other side wouldn’t make it through. Flip a coin on which one will open, and hope that it’s the one that lets God in.

She is buried six feet underground in Texas, under an indistinct marble headstone. I will never see if anyone puts flowers on it. I would have brought zinnias.