what the wound implies

is creeping out of some open window same way it was in the summer of ’95 when my heartbreak was a different animal howling at the same clouds & the cops broke up the block party at franklin park right before the song hit the last verse because someone from the right hood locked eyes with someone from the wrong one & me & my boys ran into the corner store & tucked the chocolate bars into the humid caverns of our pants pockets & later licked the melted chocolate from its sterling wrappers in the woods behind mario’s crib with the girls we liked too much to want to know if they liked us back & there it was, the summer i learned to kiss the air & imagine it bending into a mouth & here it is again, the summer everything outside i love is melting & i tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival & it’s because the heart & tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories & i’m kind of buzzed. i’m kind of buzzing. i’m kind of a hive with no begging & hollow cavities. there is intimacy in the moment where the eyes of two enemies meet. there is a tenderness in knowing what desire ties you to a person, even if you have spent your dreaming hours cutting them a casket from the tree in their mother’s front yard. it is a blessing to know someone wants a funeral for you. a coming together of your people from their faraway corners to tell some story about your thefts & triumphs. all of your better selves shaking their heads over a table, chocolate staining their teeth. i suppose there is also intimacy in the moment where a lover becomes an enemy, though it is tough 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.

barbara kruger - untitled (your devotion has the look of a lunatic sport), 1981-1983