bartleby

the dusty pearl of long-gone things,
the engineered closeness of
sisters and their long-gone brothers
mothers and their deteriorating husbands
the activation of your voice sets me apart
from dirty rags and a twenty-year-old room
finally being made to look clean.
you are in north carolina now
living on a lake.
i ask you what you write these days; non-fiction
more or less
and how you are writing it
and how you are doing

(how are you doing?)

there are many people to miss, and they all
show up on pieces of digital paper
strewn about my room like bulkless
leaves, leaving, left.

swinger

i took a series of photos of myself
called them "drops" after
the water on my hair, in my skin
feel myself breathing with you, fickle friend
unobserving lover, dispossessed, un-obsessed
the one who needs me and then doesn't, doesn't, doesn't.
i do miss your voice, and the palms of your hands.
trying not to say "i" these days
trying and instead becoming unintelligible
nothing incurable with a day or two, i'm sure.

the great lonesome

what it is to be something
when someone is somewhere
the vaguest of understandings

i stumble upon you
after releasing
wondering
"what makes me so alone here
and too full over there?"

generosity

you said that
and i've been that
and i will be it again
whether or not you are there
or care to be so

last

me too. in other ways.

the way i stay naked, and you do not.
the other things that are suggestive
of happy endings, and not in the traditional sense.

we remind ourself continually: this is not about me.
that, too, in the twisted way. the ways that we forge
to resolve cognitive dissonance. to modulate.

you and your aesthetics, me and my words.

when i realized there would be no more comments

well take a look at my back
this scar is from when i was twelve i
had a mole and they took it off and
it left a scar. this scar.
this scar too, age thirteen that means
nineteen ninety-nine when i got it
the last of year of that decade that i holler for
at night.

and this one?
no, i don't know where it came from
or how i got it, or if i got it, or if it got me.
i believe that you have meaning
because you have expression
it is not enough to see that you have bled
part of me wants to see that you can bleed.

the other scars don't mean anything
they're just evidence of
a few years ago, when i fell down and got back up
(the alternative was worse)
remarks on the shiny white life i used to have.
i'm still white that type of thing doesn't change
but my dreams are less serene.

about that other scar
i'm unsure as to whether or not you care what it says
about me, about my capacity to pick at scabs

it's just,
now you know that i know how to bleed.
i didn't mean to show you that
it just sort of happened.