secretly we all want to assassinate the president, we don’t care
who the president is. because every man in a suit distills
to husbandfather unattainable. because the burned-out shell
of a honda civic steaming against winter is more frightening
than any ditch-born skeleton of wild bone. eventually,
abstaining becomes more vice than lack of. when it’s humid
in my house I find puddles of saltwater on surfaces,
& each time am truly surprised how little
I want to put my mouth on them. nailbiters recognize
their kind by fidget & lack, & parents by the prayer
of you’re okay aimed at the houndstooth swatch of skin
& blood blooming at their child’s knee. why is it so hard to acknowledge
pain we can do nothing to assuage? whoever built hunger
must have done so just to better understand
the geometry of starvation. I pretend sometimes
that quietness is a green-eyed, steadyblazing fist & that it’s not painful
to find a person beautiful singularly. welcome
to my country. we beg for noise & demand meaning
from the ruins. we might as well build a hut of bricks & burrow, we might
as well go on howling into furniture. we all want to assassinate a knife,
we don’t care what rifle we have to dig up to do it.
re: fucking a stranger in your car, M assures me there’s only ten minutes
of conversation bridging the crevasse between emotionally unhinged
& the sexiest lick of electricity ever spoken aloud. that we can cradle
everything we want against the dim satchel of our chests & also discover
a way to become it. it’s every door in the body painted
fever-sheen, symptom without disease. it’s
what we owe to one another, not an erasure of teeth but
holding a lantern to the scars, telling stories of how they shone
like schools of salmon abandoning the water.