we skinny-dip into another conversation too salty for this early of a monkey’s year, but
saturn left his rings around your neck and gravity remembers that you’re not a cloud and the trembling of your cigarette is still surprisingly sadder than how your eyes droop faster in fake smiles. i’ve been softening around the edges lately and now it feels like i’m obliged to slap cheap horoscopes over my sternum. can’t trust anything but the pricetags, selling souls peeled bare on the night-market.
which one then, you ask; paled lips against my spine, unable to draw the line between your skin and mine and i won’t lie.
earth, i say. and too much water in my bones.
and now you’re angry because that’s metal and wood and sleeping on top of powerlines but nothing that leaves warzones without red-wet wounds and you can’t tell me to burn if i’m the one left in ashes and you cannot stop telling me to burn when i feel heavy like this.
(now there’s a howling pacing in your chest. this is the restless thing you can’t forget when you sleep next to me. i fall dead to the world around ten and you still see the shivers like ripples in the sea. words expand like lungs and you can’t catch them in dreams.)
but how would you torch yourself? you yell and oddly, it is the sun you’re facing and now i’m not sure who’s closer to the sky.
listen. LISTEN. i am mouths full of strange-blue neon light. mama told me, brushing the leaves out of my hair. people make whole cities from heartaches, from forests, from mud. and sometimes they make tiny gods.
- count one, two, you: who’s scared of chinese star-riddled truth. (tiny beasts)