ARE YOU / ARE YOU / ARE YOU?

And death comes likes this: word after word, always the words crowding in to see the disaster. The trees are no more than their rings, which cling as if to memory. Death is a horse than runs constantly toward or away from what you think you know.                                                                                    Another and another.word after word. And the sky. And the wind. And mind. A fist opening into a hand, opening like an eye.

It’s a fitting punishment for a monster. To want something so much—to hold it in your arms—and know beyond a doubt you will never deserve it.

They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror.

i suppose there is also intimacy in the moment when a lover becomes an enemy, though it is tougher to say when it happens. probably when there is a song you can’t remember them living inside of anymore, even if both of you curled your lips around the words in a car at some impossible hour of morning, driving away from the place you met. i like my agony threaded together by the same chorus. not everything is Sisyphean. no one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder.

““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”