1.

You were tricked into believing
the key to your literal survival is to sympathize
and “make” him happy

If I could get back everything I gave away,
I’d cherish it more
and move more deliberately
I would lie in the grass and read
as many books as I could,
absorb a universe of knowledge

Unfocus my eyes,
learn to hear colors,
like a Mendelssohn octet
in paint-by-number horses
and watermelon wallpaper

Deny anyone access
and dwell with the mountains
with a vow to escape
to a world of my own

2.

The intermittent “good times” were a key part of how it worked

Here lately each morning is a triumph:
I seized a chariot and chased joy across the sky.
Four flaming horses
cantered with a throaty cry.

I don’t really speak about it
but for so long I was petrified,
weeping through the dark, dark nights
tortured by awful buzzing
and flashing purple lights

And I used to care about such unimportant things:
what so-and-so said or thinks
or how slow time seemed to be,
which was very
very
short-sighted of me

3.

It’s like malware on a computer, running in the background
without any awareness or conscious decision on your end

When I sleep at night
I connect to my visions,
so I try not to sleep at night

4.

You can love him with everything you’ve got,
but if you stay,
you will sacrifice your life for no reason

It turns out
I don’t like the way anyone sounds.
I stare at his stare
and catch him looking down

“Cauterize this compassion
and don’t cry for monsters.” I lived in the village
and meditated on meditation
until I came to the realization
that all time is borrowed,
and whatever luck he had
is simply what I gave him.

I lived in the village and re-learned existence,
a continuous combination
of teary fear
and stubborn persistence,

resisting any binds
and biding my time,
borrowing lines
in the well that I wished him.

So that when I left the village
and looked over the scarred streets
where stares once meant violence
and quiet translated
to quiet defeat,
I desired the quiet
and eagerly circled its feet,
running in place,
as if in a dream.

Back in Tennessee on a green bike
with Trap and Tierra
thinking: if I don’t do it now, I never will
and counting the turns
as I pedal up the hill

Peering into the black hole where a soul should be,
missing mystery terribly
and wondering how to shift the trajectory

Long nights left me short on sleep
and praying to nonexistent entities,
with the rustles at the window
sounding more like God to me

Father, did I do worse in a past life
or is this retribution for the last time?

Send just one sign
for a lost mind
as I walk these landmines.

Or give some absolution
for all the hours spent awake,
rotten choices
coupled with terrible mistakes
and terrible shame

with only myself to blame

giving everything
to people who simply
take,
take,
take

She spoke
and I gave my best reply,
focused more on the what-now than the why

but the last thing I predicted was your absence
from the conclusion you fell on
your knees, bruised and scraped
your knuckles on the ground

What would God think of me now?
just another follower to batten down,
another comma to turn around

You want to think you understand me
, but you don’t, you don’t, you don’t
take off your shoes when you come in the house

I was talking to your roommate
who said you’re not acting like yourself,
and now I know I never knew you

; but still, I wanted to,
so I wish I never opened my mouth
because whenever I do
terrible truths come out
impossible hopes can sprout
and bloom into delible dreams,
acidic and sweet like mangosteens

You like to think you don’t like me,
and you don’t,
you don’t, you don’t
answer my texts until you need something

but I’m happy here without you
counting magnolias as they fall

and when I think about you
I don’t think about you at all

everything is coming later
like rain in april
and robins after the snow,
promises we made without speaking
yet everybody seems to know

so someone told me you liked me

(you liked me,
someone told me)

but I learned that first when I let you down
and you didn’t reach to take my hand

now everything is coming later
like blooms in early may,
a shakespearean fall from grace
turned to private victories
in a public place

so someone asked me to stay—
but if I stayed, you said,
you’d hold me,
which you weren’t sure
I would understand

stiff like superglue,
he asks to turn the music off
in service of good talk, circling the topic

at a brisk walk
me loping to keep up
and searching in vain for a second to speak up

I tell him about secret societies,
he tells me his name
I show him my vigil candles,
he folds his thumb over mine
like an origami crane

and sometimes he wants to see me
but sometimes I stay away
just to sit at bowers park in the rain
just to count the cars on the train

Sometimes, I write poems

and wrestle words into bouquets:

amateurish sprigs of promises,

representing far too much hope—

Plucking the petals

to lovingly rearrange them:

C’est la nouveau chanson,

warbled in perfect polyphony.

Where our measures match up, I figured

we could compare notes,

even if it means pulling an all-nighter

in the name of harmonic progressions—

But, at last, I’ve embraced

dissonance too, and timing

just isn’t important to me anymore.

i like the way when i was doing a puzzle

that it looked like one piece was sure to fit

but no matter how hard i tried

its rigid lines weren’t what were intended

i wanted to bend it

and where the holes were

i was sure i could mend it

but even if i could then the 

bigger picture would be distended

so if it’s the piece i never expected

the image changes, it self-explains

and i feel silly for not seeing the obvious

brush lines in the paint

this was the thing i was making!

this was it all along!

any other landscape in my mind

was both impossible and wrong.

this is the peace i was looking for—

the completion of the vision

(and with this addition

still nothing was ever missing)

I never knew but did eventually discover

the calculus of our connection.

When you gossip, you twist the truth

like a little tree in the wind

or a snake in a cell phone.

Could you stand to know that No One replaced you?

That your misogynist predictions didn’t come true.

Not because they couldn’t, but because I didn’t want them to.

God, what a joke—

Animal crackers burnt up in smoke.

You keep on checking for any sign

that I’m still suffering whereas you’re fine,

but I now count your canary’s frowns

—she makes her rounds, the rumors fly—

So sometimes she writes me cryptic letters

to mark the passing of time,

and lists the things you’ve done to her,

which seem so close to mine.

All sacrifice was theoretical,

not mathematical.

But for this I would have been a little bit better,

a little more radical.