His clothes were torn and faded

from too many summers spent

against the salt

of his skin.

His dog was ragged and looked

up at the sky

with wild eyes.

Together

they gathered sticks

and dry grasses

tucking them into

the foundations

of my house, turning my home

into my funeral pyre. I sit

quietly on my porch,

smoking a cigarette

smoking my last cigarette

I think

and watch. I think

to ask him why and then

remember that he cannot

see me from behind

the tall fence and trees.

I am a spy;

a voyeur on my own death-scene,

watching the sweat build

on the fat cheeks

of the shadow

of my fate. I tap

the ash off of my cigarette

into the small ashtray

on the table beside me

and wait.

There are not many things which could scrub these scars off of my skin. And there are even fewer things that could get them out of the crevices of my liver and lungs. It is unbalanced and yet unwavering the way my blood moves, the way my tongue feels when I am filled with so many little surgeons in white coats. But it only feels like the scars have gone away. And then it wears off and I can feel them, again, scraping up against the smoke and wine. Glaring, thick and pale, against your eyes. And the questions grate against my ears “what happened there?” “Where did you get those scars?” “Nowhere” I answer, the only word capable of crawling through the barriers of my teeth. “Nowhere, I have never been anywhere. I have never done anything. I only woke up with them already built in. Today is the first day that I have been alive.” I finish the wine. I wonder at the contents of my curious host’s medicine cabinet. “I’ve got to use the restroom,” I say and slip off into the unlit hallway.

Between the hard soil and the pale brown sky,
I cannot tell which way is up
And just before I collapse
From dehydration,

You are there with hand stretched out
To say,
“You do not need to know up from down,
But only west”

My hand in yours
We step into the sea.

My virginity
Was not a pure white flower,
Flowers do not bleed.

No delicate prize
White as unspoiled milk:
I am not a cow

I cannot be bought
Nor sold, neither can some notion
of my purity.

She was hungry,

her mouth open wide

like a great harvest moon

with the red glow circled round

and there was nothing

she could not

devour

and there was nothing

that could satiate

her celestial hunger:

that bright big mouth

of hers always open

like a blue whale

preying on krill,

trying to swallow the moon

and there was nothing

she had not

already devoured:

the universe stirred in her stomach,

she prowled for another, another

And there was nothing.

This was yet another day, in a countless series of weeks, when the burning, hard concrete of the ground was still not real enough. My thighs against the heat, my feet in the cold, chlorinated water, the contrast was still not sharp enough. The ember-tipped cigarette in my hand, the condensation-covered bottle of Thai lager between my legs, nothing. None of it was real enough.

I watched you swimming naked in the pool: your pants hanging over a chair, your shirt laying out on the barbecue, your boxers spread out on the deck, your shoes, inside the house somewhere. Fragments of you, stuck all over my home. You, who I have only met this morning (for I was far too drunk to count the night before), are in pieces all over the backyard and laughing with that gypsy grin.

It isn’t real enough. I can’t pull that grin off and squeeze it between the palms of my hands like an insect. The pool should be bloody, the way you cut yourself up and left the chunks strewn about. Your underwear should be sizzling like flesh under the heat of this sun. I should be fighting the limbs of your pants from strangling me. Your shoes should be bashing against the back door, demanding to be let out with the rest of you. Anything short of this violent scene is a fraud, you are a fraud.

You are a fraud until, from beneath the smooth surface of the water, I feel your arms wrap round my legs and hear you exhale as you emerge from below. And that irremovable gypsy grin of yours telling me that the waters great, I should come in.

“No thanks,” I say after a sip of beer, through a smile, “I’d rather wait.”

You ask what I am waiting for and I feel your arms squeeze around my legs. “Almost,” I say, trying to mimic that smile of yours, “almost,” but it isn’t real enough yet: the fragments are everywhere, but there isn’t any blood, any carnage. And no man tears himself open without some blood getting spilled.

It had begun as a series of wordless screams so that the sound of the traffic outside was muffled and the light coming in from the windows became shadows. All of the senses, reduced to the negative image of themselves—undeveloped like a forgotten roll of film.

It had remained for years, slowly turning into a few words, fragments of phrases, getting louder so that the sound of it had blurred all of the light except for the lowest of frequencies—reds being the only frequencies she could see, she turned her skin that familiar color.

It grew softer, becoming whispers when she drank, when she swallowed those other things which could numb the bones and slow the pulsing of the screams. Whole sentences now in whispers that tangled into the roots of her hair and caught in her ears and lips.

She could not remember the last time she closed her eyes. Each time she had tried, her feet detached from the ground and her body twisted in the currents high up in the atmosphere, where there is nothing at all to hold on to. And the screams were always loudest up there. No, she could not close her eyes.

She was exhausted, from this sleepless decade, not remembering what skin and bones felt like when they weren’t tired. But there was only one kind of sleep left for her, now.

Only one kind of sleep left. But there was still so far to go. Each heavy step forward begging the question of how much farther.

How much farther until it would be alright to lay down and close her eyes? The dirt welcomed her feet home each time they met but the eyes all around reminded her there was still so far to go, so far to go.

There was still so far to go.

A word
from my mouth
is a withered
yellow leaf in the desert
sun in comparison
to a look
into my eyes
from you.

I have never felt so known
by anyone. And now you
are back out in the sunset
from where you flew in.

And here I am,
filled with so many
of these dry words,

all over again.