𝔰𝔩𝔦𝔪𝔢 𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯

bedbound at the regularly scheduled interval. my blood a hornet swarm. my heart, a sparrow, starving. shimmering mirage my spine hardly touches the mattress. how hard it is to be still, to feel this body aging, this siphoning of stolen hours. you dream with open eyes, a warden rapt by the evidentiary splatter of my sanguine notions. unclean. here i am when your sleep covets the fever of my starsick body how needful, your unconsciousness. not my doe-eyed dark shot through with waltzing geometry. dogs howling in my good ear. my name over and over. over and over, i'm falling through the ceiling, conspiring with an attic full of ghosts.

when i was little, i thought the sun made the cicadas' sound. i tell you so. you say I'm still little. handle me like to prove it. like a knick knack you've collected. like a pale, flaccid thing suspended in formaldehyde. you hold me to the light to a chorus of 'is it real.' once, i might have been. anyway, you say I'm still little and pull me into your orbit. cheek mashed against the star on your chest, i wonder if you heard what i said about it. i thought the sun sang to me in those long dead canine days of june. you say I'm still little. you don't know how true it is.

calvaria cresting glooming waters the moon, i. sleepwalk under here in this stillborn hour i flood the heavens between us with heatlightning dreams and psalms carried on the serpenting currents of my tongues

dreamed the sky was full of gar and alligators. they sang to me in a nonsense language. sun filmed green with algea. i sat on top of the old courthouse, a silver dome, smoking. a white trash deity. woke with my fingers to my lips.

curdled longing slips blackened fingers into my pauses my empty pockets pries at the closet door laughs with cloistered corpses dogs my oldest bones

celestial body always above me fallen affections vestigial love i'm fucking up i'm fucking up forever trailing stricken and dumb forever chasing vaporous touch grazing the tether failure in the clutch

your hands bladed with agony your sawtoothed need scrape me clean sinless skinless soul to keep after the ruin after the bleeding i am new a shining ruby

each morning a miscarriage a larval iteration of flesh brainless and writhing eyeless with hunger dancing to the locust hum lodged in the throat of this flourishing starvation a year long scream a desert night-weeping for the sun every dawn a shard of glass

"I would like to address the matter at hand, but I don't know what it is."