#lbbil

Some god of the back garden settles down next to me on a low brick wall and with a voice like that one bird with the broken voice you can never see singing asks me “have you ever been hungry?” which, of course i’ve been hungry before, and i tell him that, of course i’ve been hungry. to eat is to be hungry, to devour is to be hungry in blatant excess and i’ve done both and he just grins in a mourner’s smile, grins wide and angry and presses his shoulder into mine. “Have you ever had enough?”

Desert got its bones in you. Can’t love anything that immortal and not come back changed, come back unscathed. Sand weathered skin and conditional immortality. Black glass fucking city in the desert where you lived all lit up and shining like arson gone domestic, black fucking glass in the sand where the lightning strikes reflect the night sky. Rainstorm on the horizon. Desert got into your fucking blood by this point. Rainstorm overhead. Floodwater would kill you just as sure as the sun does. Rainstorm over the far-off lit up belly of the city. If you look there are things that grow in the desert. Rainstorm on the far horizon. If you look there are things that live with the desert in them just like you do. Wasteland with a green underbelly. Desert wrapped around your soul and sinking roots in. Conditional immortality. The desert says to you, one night when the cold is in your lungs deeper than any word you’ve ever spoken, you will die, yes. I will kill you, yes. You will come back, yes. Rainstorm on the horizon. Floodwater. Drought. To live in a desert is to know each extreme. To live with the desert in your soul is to not be killed by either. Sun breaks like an egg over the sky. The desert carves new houses for itself out of your bones.

You sit half sprawled in a desk in a way i’m not sure desks are meant to fit people and with every edge of you on display you look at me and a smile crawls across your face like a centipede. I’m dreaming. This has to be a dream. This must be a dream.

to be divine is to be hungry but never sated. you’ve been an empty lot kind a god for a while now and you still don’t know how to get rid of the nosebleed and the bruises. you still don’t know what worship feels like when it fills your emptiness because a god can only want more, these days. no, wait. gods have only ever wanted more. they ate their offspring in the old days. they splintered themselves off into mountains and high walled kingdoms and you swear, blunt and angry by your own divinity, you swear as the empty lot gets sold again, but no one’s ever gonna build here. they call it haunted. gods and ghosts have never been that different. they used to have temples though, now only ghosts do. to be divine is to be hungry. how long have you been going hungry, dear-darling-bastard-divinity. how long have you been alive. who’s gonna build your temple here. who’s gonna remember you. who’s gonna ask around and find our how hungry a god has to be before they can die, how much does a god have to endure before they can leave behind a ghost. who’s still singing for you. who could possibly remember you, after all this time. who’s scraps do you survive on, god?

youre all bubblegum oversweet with the line of your back a bubble ready to snap into motion or maybe just snap, i dont pay enough attention to your spine to understand what keeps it together, how you keep it together but fuck babe one day i hope you grow enough of it out of your back to leave. and i really don’t know much which is kinda fatalistic of me because i dont know much except the way the word END looks like a bullet when you write it out all caps and you line it up but i dont know all that much about ends really even when theyre leveled at my chest. but babe if you would want to id let you put your hands on my chest overlapping on my chest and press down over and over until i start breathing again or you hear something vital snap inside me. put an end where my heart should be. put a fist through my lungs. weve spent a lot of time deep in the city and i dont think it would notice if we left or stayed as ghosts, i dont think it would notice our passing but gods willing i hope we do. i hope you notice when you take my breath away for the final time on some shitty fire escape and i never have to breathe your air again.

snow in summer like an old friend come back home with the gravedirt on his best sunday suit, like sweetheart why’d you leave if you were going to come back when i’d already grieved your passing, like what’s wrong with your hands, what did you claw your way out of to come back home, what could have possibly kept you so long. was it death or was it the soil and the absence of a coffin and the absence of a marker, were you drawn to haunt me by the unsettled earth still frozen. the frost was in season then, no surprise at the effort it took to split the cold earth apart. did you bring it with you when you came back?

Rotten swollen lip scavenger’s god in the alleyway under my window with his branch-on-window scrape of a laugh, modern day puck with no king to bend his loyalty to, pretty moonlight-and-neon on canines and all his teeth are sharp enough to rend. King of the rat and racoon and roadkill and when the sky is down a moon he sits on the trash bins and screams like a city fox until the city goes summer-peach-bruised. God of the butterfly knife tricks and tiny scars on your fingerips and knuckles, god of the dartboard, drunken bet, its all good fun until someone hits a bullseye, king of the gutter. king of the black eye and hangover and every last cockroach. blessings on him in the morning when everything’s fucking copacetic. blessings on him on the night highways when the dashboard lights blink off. He’s been hungry for a long time. He’s never been hungry before. His grin sweeps the alleyway, laughter a weapon, king of the carcass. God of the city. City incarnate.

Soul too new-green-growth to be kindling, too small to make a fire with. Burns from the inside anyways, consuming and devouring even as my hands shake and the knife shakes with it. The winter chill sets in and even though we’re hollowed-out-hungry this blood won’t wash off easy. Every year the summer eats a few more weeks of winter. Every year the heat splits us open like lightning hitting a tree, and the cold crawls in after it. Every year we get hungrier.