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igeneous we were forged in fury, ancient as the blackbirds who remember the world without a moon, we who learnt to play with fire, back when anaximander dreamed the earth a drum suspended in dark space. but we knew better, sizzling and crackling down jagged cliffs to vermillion seas. our love erupted from the cauldrons of volcanoes, singing through smoke and dust, leaving behind a trail of lava for our children to follow but when they were born, they were black as shadow sedimentary we lurk the crevices of underground caves, our lips too burnt to sing. the world is too much for us, so we learn to disappear within each other, colours mingling like a rainbow drowning in the sky. in a parallel life, blackbirds build nests of skeletal twigs, waters dance to the whims of a silver moon and the jilted barren mountains yearn for the sky to kiss them wet and green but we who have died long ago, our blood petrified in our veins, our love an ancient fossil, die in silent sleep everyday metamorphic sometimes we remember our own demented dreams, where we fall to the abyss like icarus only to fly away with the wings of fire. we’d sing that story every night till our lips were burnt black with the despair of hope. sometimes i think i know you as someone else, as dust motes glittering goldenly or as leaves of russet, whispering through the heart of a broken town. we are ancient spirits of the air, trapped in crumbling stone, sending our last wish to the blackbirds who’ve claimed the star-stitched sky as home. once we fell to fly, now we fall, fall, fall to remember to fly again ✱✱✱ 
I still believe I can build a space shuttle With tinfoil helmets we wore as children And garbage I glean from street corners. Please let me craft our mother ship In your backyard—my home sickness Is the size of Pluto. Cold war kids like us can’t wait for wealth, Trickling down from superpowers. We have to launch our own salvation. Our Space Race is between landlords And every one of our ancestors who never Could defy the gravity of this town. We were bound to these tenement space stations The day our parents signed our birth certificates. Slumlords will redline us outside The city limits of their solar systems If we linger in this neighborhood. They will terminate our mission to exist With eviction notices, claiming our rent payments Aren’t big enough to live on this planet. We will be homeless like Pluto, Exiled because we are too small to brawl The bullies of the universe out of our path. Houston, we’ve had a problem since we were born And mission control’s phone lines are dead. If NASA could slingshot Apollo 13 Around the moon, two broke kids Can escape the orbit of the ghetto. We will blastoff from this neighborhood, Abandon this paycheck-to-paycheck city, Discover a new galaxy to call home. Our small step away from the man Is a giant leap toward a homeland. ✱✱✱
my kaleidoscopic silhouette infinitely fades and replicates. every summer has been spoiled by excessive fire and my face is swollen from all the dying stars i slid underneath my skin. i break open my own heart and stuff it with glue, glitter, and gunpowder. now i feel like a purring engine or a cold robot; if you look closely, my sweat is made of little silver bolts. i am purifying my bones, electrifying my tongue. i want to talk like a radio-- full of static and interest. ✱✱✱ 
Caterpillars slurp the soup of their own bodies to grow and I can’t imagine we were told that you have to eat your skin and stomach and heart to become something beautiful. I want to read you poetry but your thumb bears down on my lip to expose sharp-wet bone and I’m starving, so I want to bite clean through until you’re gushing copper and salt on my tongue. I don’t, but I think about it. I think about devouring your heart but I won’t even taste myself on your fingers in case I’m not any good. I think maybe kissing with our eyes closed means we’re paying attention or we’re afraid of seeing each other or we just want it warm and dark and quiet while we eat. You tell me this is bigger than us—this is longing with the lights out and you’re trying to take it all in without drowning. It seems selfish, taking it all, so I don’t. I let you have it instead and wonder if my insides are enough to drown in and I think maybe you want to because you haven’t been taught how to swallow. With every stroke we’re unzipped, oil-slick soft light spilling out until I don’t know whose breath I’m holding, until I’m holding nothing at all. ✱✱✱
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BE EXTREMELY WARY AFTER MEETING W GHOST DOGS PAST SUNDOWN:sitting still on the comically broken bus bench staring past the rear of the express ashland bus as it stops for me lowered + waiting 5 seconds before leaving me alone again thanks! i wasn't sure if it would take me to the right place even tho it definitely would no, wait actually the reason i didn't move from the bench was because i thought it was currently the funniest thing to do especially w a dead phone everything is funnier w a dead phone but it got too funny tho someone across the street literally died from laughing so hard so i had to skateboard away from the crime scene west [2 jetskis have fun on the hudson river but they are not will smith + eva mendes + they are not u + i u tommy wright u creep at nite i want to hold my breath until i feel lightheaded + then kiss u i hold my breath until i feel lightheaded + miss u what if i moved there + we dated? i could win the mega millions but feel too scared to buy a lottery ticket] take the damen bus south home + eat fresh insanity is getting the same sandwich from subway every single time + for no apparent reason expecting it to taste like 8th grade insanity is i'm sry i have to go back home to the state i live in i'm working on making less selfish actions i'm working on making less actions EAR INFECTION CANCER LEG:every time i come home 2 my parent's house i eat some of my dead dog's tramadols + eventually they will all be gone + my parents might ask "why did u eat all the dead dog's painkillers?" + i might say "it looks like u answered ur own question" ✱✱✱
Blue like Iceland's opaque lagoons or blood vessels under pale flesh the candle vomits blue wax burns down I watched the wax pool and drain pool and spill for twenty minutes about the same amount of time I sat listening to hymns watching for your coffin lid to wiggle creak open an inch enough space for an arthritic finger to show ice blue, crowned with a coral-painted talon Some animals lay next to their dead and we laid over ours through wood, varnish, metal hinges. Six-feet of soil I remember lying awake at night hearing you breathe next to me and then stop I prayed to Jesus, the beetle, and you exhaled. Yet the coffin remained shut. I will find a coral fingernail in the soil we buried you under and I will wear it in a locket around my neck our secret a message that you are now some place where coral nails are not needed. Nor fingers the color of blue lagoons, for that matter. ✱✱✱
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