the color you see is the color you keep

two thousand, eight hundred and four miles from home.

you could weep and weep, no one wise to salt, and it would all feel as it always has.

Terrible with grace and goodbyes, but I’ll keep practicing, just for you.

A quiet tongue, resting for too long. Time, has made strangers of us both.

despite its closure, despite other hearts held, so that your tongue and departure do not wound another.

Lead the paranoid to a heap of broken bones, and see how fast they build an idol.

I can hear the words, yet cannot speak them.

I have become better at hiding that I am.

Never too late to learn.

Last one to leave, nickel winking onto visor, sweat sinking into corners: the last salt you will ever taste is your own. How often will you dream, of cotton not woven with heavy carbon fiber and polyester? The last words of everyone ever met ringing softly in your ears, saying goodbye and farewell and see you, on the other side- A jealous tinge hanging tight to each syllable. How was the first night of logic, behind the same words with different meanings? Last to feel flesh pressing to seat back, and then endless black and silence, save for the subtle clicks of hidden machines. Last one hundred pages of paper ever made crease under your fingers, what will they read after one thousand years? Triumph, defeat, insanity... Hope.

Silence as a weapon: You win. The teeth will stay rooted in jaw bone- happy and humble eager to grind. Pearls and the first place of love have not heard: You win.

On the other side of a death, and I am not in the world, the house of clarity we have is going to wilt. At the same time, a rattle of ducts must be with half-moons and well rested. Thinking ahead on another thirty years the way a crystal sphere would: with promise, vague understanding, sprinkles of grief, a broken rib, mostly questions. Thanks, for letting me know when you leave and return, so I always know how to paint my face accordingly.

Morning.

Hurry and get hung up on groove, licked clean with words twisted on perspective, and pain, and assumption... No scholars, or gods, only animals with binary river raging: all of your life is not a smooth rock. Caught in the morning dew of importance, heavy and wet, slick with the same places of worship. These columns cannot evolve, slack threads caught to noose shadow.

Blue.

with all of the hurt.

I could show you mine, if you could show me yours, and here we are: shuffling through a universe, one grain at a time blind and voiceless, reaching out...