drag your rat heart out of your chest

fake a first person

[ekphrasia]

not every thing with wings is an angel, she says, and you say, oh? what are you, then? there’s a thin smile, there and gone. the burn of eyelids meeting salt water for the first time. read between the lines because she won’t tell you what you are and you’re too afraid to keep asking.

you have rough hands. you feel bad about touching her. it doesn’t feel like love when she lets you braid her hair. it feels like pity. your fingers shake, and you swallow back the weight of hope you’ve carried since you were too young to understand what you were hoping for. is this alright? you keep asking. is this alright? does it pull? does it hurt? she’s not patient, and she doesn’t know why you hesitate. her sharp yes only makes it harder to keep your hands steady.

there’s no sentimentality for angels; the entire world is sentiment for them. you don’t know why you, of all people, were chosen.

at night she’s cold, and slips under your blankets. you lie still, heart hammering, even as she twines herself around you like you’re a source of warmth and a poor one at that. you should feel used, or dirty. you feel humbled and honored and wonder what she’d have to say about this if she wasn’t asleep, whether she’d make fun of you for being a fool in love.

so this is what it means to be in love with one of god’s own creatures. not every thing with wings is an angel, she says, her face tilted up to the sun. it makes her throat glow. she looks at the birds and you look at the eyes in the hollow of her collarbone. imagine the fragile flutter of eyelids against your skin.

you’re all human fragile sentimentality and she mocks you relentlessly for it, for the old cloak you wear that’s devoid of warmth and the old flat you keep because your mother died here.

but sometimes i think you’re closer to god than i ever will be, she says. it’s nearly dawn, and you’re shoulder to hip against the night sky. god is wanting. we don’t want. you burn with shame and try to imagine what that’s like. all the years of your life you held your love in and looked away women and didn’t dare name what you felt for fear of god. to be told you're closer to It than someone like her undoes something inside you. the knot falls away and underneath it you’re bitter and hopeless and angry.

it makes you reckless. what if i want you to kiss me? you ask, and revel in the uncomfortable heat of the wrong words clawing their way out of your chest.

she looks at you like you’re magic. hold onto that wanting, she murmurs. it’ll fly you to heaven one day. she slips her hand into yours and you rest your head against your knees. there’s the thin comfort of knowing she won’t hold your desire for her against you but

how long can you want without having? how long can you be all desire and no satiation? if you have to starve to death for ascent you don’t want to ascend. you want her to kiss you. you want someone to want to kiss you.

this is what you get for falling in love with an angel.

[ekphrasia]

i have been made aware of some shortcomings. wherever possible i try to descend the staircase the wrong way, but this doesn’t always work out in the favor of the railings. i lost a shoe in an elevator once. i still think about the chewing gum i scraped off it two days before i lost it. why did i bother working so hard, standing on the pavement in the hard summer sun with shame singeing my socked right foot as i scrape-scrape-scrape it’s unfathomable that we try with all mazes right around the corner. but we never feel trapped, you know this. a room is a room and a heart is a bright thing if you have to walk home from the store with one shoe in your hand. a place becomes a language that devours you and grows its own horns, slivers of rigid hair arcing into the sky. it does us no good to deny these, our failings, ringed like eclipses or the hand of a liar, holding a shoe.

[ekphrasia]

too much a writer to ever be known, the ability to read fell by the wayside five years ago now with the realization that the sum of all books is isolation and repetition. armed with awful knowledge, forgetting becomes a problem. all created hells are good practice for when death comes. interestingly, ‘hells’ is not a real word. the machine of innovation is not inexorable, but is fed instead by constant endeavor to fail at justice. possible subjects include the weather and in the end what destroys does not endure, which is a metaphor for the realization that the milk is going sour. punctuated cuts of light fall upon strips of words.

[ekphrasia]

ghost in a field of wheat, field of flowers, broken water. stuff of dreams. stuff of grieving. hard earth. blue moths to cool flame. glands for lying.

[ekphrasia]

like all tired romances, the cities vanish at dawn. the people are left to wander the bare earth, water slushing under their bare feet, their bare heads vulnerable to the sun. the sun, the sun, the sun.

if after the cities vanish one tries to chase after them if after the cities vanish one tries to become them tries to remake them, one comes up mostly empty.

we do not return home, or go to work. those blue lovers find each other and settle themselves in the dust. a child is lost and found again. a bird, turned up dead, launches itself into the sky. we know where we are going, and where we came from, but not where we are.

in the burnt land of the vanished city trees may grow, though slowly, and grass may grow, though yellow.

we never expect it, no matter how many times it happens. we are in our beds and then we are on the ground. we never learn our lesson, though it is taught to every generation.

the cities may return at nightfall. the people may vanish as the moon rises.

it's hard to tell where we end and the city begins.

[ekphrasia]

your lover is dead in the water. your lover is making you food at home. in a house with 12 rooms, you're dead in the 14th. your lover killed you in the river. you sang at your lover's funeral. your lover took your coat off at home, and kissed you, and took you to bed.

you watched while they dug your lover's grave. your lover handed you roses the morning you killed them. your lover is in the 13th room. your lover is a house that you're haunting.

you're not dead enough to deal with this. your lover works at the morgue. your lover is pulling the shroud over your body when your lover's body is brought in. you haven't killed more than you've died. you've died. you're dying. you're still alive.

[ekphrasia]

look a complication. take control of the audience. decide to bar the doors. fuck you this will never be a real thing this will never be a clean thing. do not self-destruct. it’s pointless, like peeling grapes. like throwing away the seeds. mostly you can make music out of anything but no one will want to listen to it.

what do you want me to admit? i miss outsides. i miss saying things out loud. i’m on the other side of a locked door under the church’s gate thinking for crying out loud is this all you’ve got? i should’ve stayed home. i’m much too frightened of your rough hands. i’m disinclined towards soil rock natural beauty.

you can draw water into any shape you think fits if you’re willing to sacrifice the readiness of the metaphor. blunt pencil blue gold blah blah you know the road ahead. i don’t. i’m trying not to know. i wish there was concrete here. bridge under my feet and water below the bridge.

like you’re always saying it’s time to forget about it. fuck the outside. we’re happy at home not having to change the curtains. let’s never return home. let’s walk along the curve of a bay the wrong way around. perfect circle. i want to see more birds here the same time next year. they will eat seeds.

[ekphrasia]

I should find a poem for you. I think you'd love it better than I could.

[ekphrasia]

i would fall in love with you and i would write about you. i wouldn’t fall in love with you. writing about you is a free action. a pen is never far from my hand. a photo of you in waning light gathers dust. taken in october, revisited every july since. 

it’s an ocean to love you against, setting sun. salt water. gold sand. it’s what i write about when i love you. but there are plastic bags on the beach, and an abandoned car tire in the water, and the sun’s obscured by chemical fumes. i don’t know why i’m telling you this, i really don’t. i wouldn’t fall in love with you anyway. you’re too good for me.

forget about the ocean. i don’t care about you or the water. i want to squint at the sun through my fingers, let the red light catch on the edges of my fingers and turn my bones to fragile flame. it’s better when i’m by myself and i don’t have to worry about how you’d take it.

[ekphrasia]

there are love stories like flower crowns on branches, dead leaves, the sound of water, gold light in the meadow and then there’s our love story, which is more like the story of death. rotting bramble, fading moon, blood winding between floorboards i’ve been good for you, tried harder than most, but i’d rather be a ghost than keep us alive a moment longer

[ekphrasia]

hating the damage of myself, the destruction hands cause by existing, crumpled paper and sightless flowers and all fragile deaths made possible by my life. guilt, or the absence of it, breaks something vital in the heart of stars. i don’t want to live on this alone breathing. i have more bones than skin, more infinity than cages.

[ekphrasia]

it’s a way of life, leaving early to beat the traffic. i don’t think of it as drowning anymore. just gold edges and blue light glinting off of your wrists, shining moment of death. no hunger.

but i’m tired of ghost rites. i want to be both miraculous and undead. i want a promise like salt flaking off a seagull’s feathers, crunching white and bitter and brighter than the sun.

i’ll let you live with the sound of the exhaust fan, days in and out, broken rhythms light as the air. everything that falls down eventually rises, becomes sweet rain sliding off a bird’s beak into the ocean.

forget it. why am i selling this to you? what matters is the low heat of the toaster and the parallel burns on your thigh. i’m done being the bird, the salt, the ghost, the gold edge. i’m done with being dead. i think i’m going to be free.

[ekphrasia]

you're going to throw my body in the sea,      the kind that doesn't dissolve what lies in it.  like a mirror in reverse: 

     my mouth smiling,      the sunlight on my face like     your hands,      the blood still wet under my nails.

if there was anymore left of me, I'd give it to you. but I can't kneel  in water,     so it's less a baptism      and more a funeral shroud. 

I'm sorry for the metaphor. I'm sorry about the light in my stomach. i’m      sorry about the way it ended      my death and     your loneliness.

     you can trace the marble planes of the city where     we died some knife     still buried in the steps and glass in your throat from the     shattered window from which i fell

at least the water     holding me is clear and kind      the way you never had the courage to be the ice comes;     it is warmer than your eyes.

[ekphrasia]

there was blood on the rooftops, sliding off the awning the way rain would if it ever rained in this city 

[ekphrasia]

what are we admitting to? what are we allowing?

[ekphrasia]

like a bird trying to nest in a burning bridge, you want to live somewhere beautiful. it’s a dream of metal beams crashing into water with cars. people inside them. it looks like a movie. it looks like a ribcage splitting open. i’d love to talk to you again someday.

one of those cars rises again, floats into the sky. lands somewhere in the town you grew up in. you can’t name this town, but it glows on maps. glows like your mouth after you insult your family. the hurt in the swimming pool. get on your knees before you fall apart.

i’d keep you inside forever like a bird, so no burning bridge’s embers could touch your feathers. i’d bury you in blue light. i’d make dreams come true if it meant i wouldn’t have to see you again. and you’ve been lying this entire time. i’ve got a truth, but it fell into the sea with metal beams.

[ekphrasia]

it's a blood on the carpet kind of afternoon, never compromising on death when life's just out on the porch, smoking. make the most of these dark summers. it's fun. nothing wings its way down to the basement with the drying guts on the walls. we'll last to the end of autumn at this rate. we're fine with what we lost.