#lilacsea

[poetofthelilacsea]

if you have no way to float then you

must forge wings from water. buoy them with the noise you can't make. it's good to be alive and it's good to be a wake even if you have no way to swim and must borrow someone else's arms. or forge a raft from fire. Tie it with the words you can't say. if you have no way to make noise, you must forge a mouth from wanting bone.

[poetofthelilacsea]

you are no better

than the clouds. Full of water. Darwin and his successors say we differ in degree not kind.

They were thinking thick-shelled tortoise and shrew. I am thinking your mouth, open like a venus flytrap.

less fragile, but just as hungry.

.... FORTY FOLLOWERS! BLESSINGS UPON EACH OF YOU

[poetofthelilacsea]

on growing a spine

the backbone is a teeter-totter, a surfboard on a tidal wave. Rue the day it has to emerge; chive blossom from the bulb in your chest. At best, the backbone is the ever-aching, stable as long as life keeps you swaying instead of spilling over

[poetofthelilacsea]

a list of things that fly

birds and stones tossed from glass houses. and moths. words when thrown the right way. anything when thrown the right way. Here, catch. Planes. the people in them. All their words are flying too, and their clothes, and their dreams. Here, land. chickens, if only for a moment. Paper planes. Your fingerprints in the crease of the wings.

[poetofthelilacsea]

sure, why not

we can be anything. make up a county at the bottom of the ocean. i am an anemone in the mariana trench. make up a kingdom built of roadside snow. you are a skate slicing the surface of lake superior. we can be deep. we can be blue. we can be anything else that describes the sea anything else that describes the moon light, speckled, and far from earth.

[poetofthelilacsea]

ingrown

turning to the sun stretched out and up fine as silk and tall as ice but small

enough

to slide down the throat and choke, but to swallow never

small enough

i have always been too much

turning to the dark earth crouched down on hands and knees in the black

soil

fingernails and mouth bloated with the

black soil

i have always been too little

[poetofthelilacsea]

unclean

a car runs through a light the colour of a blood vessel. if you want badly enough the sensation of doing something wrong you can get it almost anywhere. you can make anything wrong if you want it to be. hold my hand or drink a long, tall glass of water in the night, pretending life itself is a sin, each deepened breath you take.

[poetofthelilacsea]

mountains

You came from the flatline of the country. Some world wider than this one: here, the horizon comes in waves and spikes. Tall, sharp, beats. Your world is a tight sheet on a fresh dry bed. A land to lie down in. This land is for looking. Your eyes, like two open ponds pressed round into the hillside, press into the warm green angles of the valley.