write me a note on how to stay here: you, the cloud eater, the sword keeper. how do we learn not to go? even when i am with them, i am not housing myself and if i had to give you an example for anything equally untied to reality, it is how i would have smelled like mandarines around you, always, if we had happened to meet earlier in this period of blooming -  i think, i would like to sleep inside your body. - but maybe i only wish to become less than a dream because dreams are always oddly unrooted. (nowadays wishes come star-shaped like fractured limbs of old trees unfurling violently inside my throat / nowadays every word storms out of this mouth like only wailings do, like only the wild things do.) i think i cracked a rib or two while i walked on my hands, i wanted to keep my feet off the ground to keep me from running, but then i forgot that i cannot breathe upside down, please tell me, when did you learn how to do it?

happy birthday Aditi

Aditi. Aditi? Aditi! Aditi…

half of my heart is a car crash & what's left of her passenger airbag burns in another man's mouth. | i have this dream - again - where i force the beast's jaw with a fruit knife & all our blue slips out.

the unspoken agreement is not to touch (now): bodies are too easily consumed. there is a ghost knocking against your skin while you open up for someone's hands and i imagine the heady weight of names like marbles on my tongue / every letter resembles the shape of yours. how it pains me to know that i love you un-fleetingly! mama wouldn't agree, but this hurts me better than the sight of my favorite memory pressed into colours of the night. honestly though, i want the cut-throat cleaned hopes. i haven't dreamed of you in a while. there is a timeline where we wear each other's bras while we yell in the kitchen when the blue blooms like bruises on our bones. in this one, i want to put my spine where it touches yours in times of insecurity and trembling. i want to slip into your folded hands and turn the knife outwards. which hour is the our, now that the earth scrambles for new perspectives? i have a heart and each poem is another way to let you watch me peel off its thick alligator skin. we still look too hungry to refuse other mouths. their fingers come off wet: always. morning pale-pink giggles in the distance. we are un-sorry: continue to feed us our messy little loves. the splinters cut them / too rough.

i. last night i went through the ceiling and found my hands bound by gold rings: in this dream diti says people like us should stand on tip-toes while eating sun. her hair is the un-holy halo she would wear dancing with her grandfather’s sword and i think i cry. how beautiful her heart feels like a cracked eggshell pounding behind my ribs.

i'll hand out the name and the body and the blue: split three ways like a whore or her god and it won't matter to the ripples of wet purple spreading like bruises along the rims of space i would call soul if i were attached to human labels of religious violence. i only know this: my feet slipping in and out of water as if it was an easier woman than me and the laughter crawls up my legs as if you had given it, as if you had given it to me (only: once). i'll hand out the name and the body and he touches your mouth through mine (sorry sorry sorry. blisters.)  but i don't apologise. (wouldn't that be smog pressing against the heavy want of clouds?)  i'm punched into perspective like a car still burning after the crash or softly skinned figs: i'll tell him, when he asks about it. and i say, point to the body, listen, this is where she passes me through. i carry her heart. i carry her too.