How I spent ten years searching for a home

in my own body. How I pilgrimaged

worm-like through the dirt

of the heart. Its small towns and regulars.

Its toy cars and cinemas.

Cities were not built here.

Showmen were not born here.

The things that flock here

have not named themselves

but we identify them by the ways in which

they color our skies. Shovel Gun Shovel.

Make sure you come armed. Be sure

to show up knowing what you want

lest you misfire. When you arrive

at the empire of my heart, please

bring violence. Bring your armies.

I am asking that you charge into

the graveyards and homes of my sternum.

I am asking you to draw your sword,

Shovel Gun Shovel, to approach

loudly, to stomp on the doormats,

to make yourself known. Do not let me

forget you. Do not let me go easy.

Do not come bearing peace.

When you arrive at the heart’s fortress,

light fires. Capture my villagers.

When you decide to leave the countryside

and settle down across my landscape,

do not take your small pale blue car.

Do not stop at gas stations on the way

and smile at strangers as you pay for your coffee.

Take your knife. Come hungry and merciless.

Do not surrender until you have what you want.

i think of you in your favorite sweater

and weep. i’m in the local coffee shop,

by the way, and feeling like a creation.

like something that was made to survive

the end of the world.

i’m too peculiar to go out in an ordinary way

but i’m not selfish. i’ll take what i can get.

(the sweater has two holes,

one in the right wrist

and one across the collar.

like a lover took a knife

and put them there so that you might breathe.)

i’m a disaster in slow motion, the kind

you have to step back from to notice.

a wave the ocean rejected, behemoth

and hungry for a taste of humankind.

i want to view this from afar and above.

i want the lemons on cutting boards,

the infectious peals of laughter,

the radio-wave sun.

i want you, whole and returned to me,

like an artifact from an ancient civilization.

i stormed because i believed this to be the only way to devour.

i grew blue-hot under the tormented moon.

(the sweater is blue, and knows your scent like a dog)

in the coffee shop, they don’t take to weeping lightly.

take your existentialism elsewhere.

they play soft music

make mute conversation.

so i order that drink you like.

that i always pretended to like too.

you and your rickety holiness.

patron saint of tidal waves and sweaters.

most days i feel like a thing spinning in the rafters.

left to find my way to the ground after the party is long gone.

and all these strange stares, animal.

this, at long last, is an exhalation.

all the things i have wanted to say.

loss became a hole just beneath my left atrium.

like breathing could hold you there.

i up hold the paradox that is love

against all calculable odds.

i run the numbers through my machine:

we shouldn’t be good.

we shouldn’t be holy.

and despite this, tenderness.

and despite this, light.

and despite.

i overview and look over.

i analyze and edit.

we shouldn’t be wondrous,

and yet.

and yet.

in the room flooded with yellow light

you were on fire.

we could not have predicted this.

hair falling on a shoulder.

we could not have computed this answer.

when we ran all the systems

we did not think about this.

how your body is a sun in the darkness.

and all the stars were shapes beneath your eyes.

according to all known odds,

we are ruinous.

cosmically hopeless.

and yet. and despite. and regardless.

in the field beneath the sky

you saw everything.

you should end back at the center where you started.

all things should return neatly to their place.

i want you to be tender with what remains.

the absence of love leaves no fossils.

your hunger will not return to the earth.

to decay, first understand

the feeling of palm against flesh.

first have something to leave behind.

something you want them to know about.

i am on my knees in the dirt.

i am burying my tenderness - i keep a little

for myself, my friends, the earth.

the shovel sings hard and cold.

i understood rot by understanding growth.

i am sure someone will be here some day.

at the axis of the end.

where love and death intersect

if indeed they ever cease to do so.

to have my hand, you must have one of your own.

get dressed next to me in the mirror.

i understood complexity by knowing simplicity.

how every color makes up the next.

i am not sure you will be here tomorrow.

tonight the air is fragile and the sky bold.

we exist as a handful of everything.

exhale onto your palm and spread me across the world.

despite myself, i want to see it all.

i want to walk into the darkness

and bring back souvenirs for your nightstand.

you should end back at the center where you started.

with your body three-dimensional.

existing in the plane of existence.

and the sky will be bottle-green tonight.

and the hands we will hold, only now alive.

sinew beneath flesh above bone.

god speaks in a soft voice

as the world turns technicolor dawn.

it’s so easy to love.

you’d be surprised.

so i walked through the city

as it was falling apart. so i watched

those intricate and quiet lives burn

like buildings. tired of being

too big for their bodies.

and the windows.

wide open. catching the storm.

so i closed my eyes against the wind

of the end. listened to the whisper

in my ear.

aren’t we so beautiful?

we are.

we are.

doesn’t everything and everyone

matter so much?

so much. like the sun.

like a funeral pyre.

burning

and burning. and saying:

we will move on from this.

we have loved. and we will love.

so i opened my eyes to a world in love.

with each other, the music,

the birds. enough to swell with it.

enough to dance.

and i sat in silence and i understood.

and i put on the music and i knew.

i saw it, the turning, the answers

hidden everywhere, singing

beneath my skin, turning

like the ever-dancing world, waiting

for me to give it the cue. the signal,

the lighthouse standing in the middle

of terribleness, saying the goodness

is the solution and i’m here, i’m waiting

for it, so send it over in whatever form it takes.

i locked eyes with the night.

warm gentle shimmering beast.

and it no longer mattered who made it

with their ambiguous and lonely hands

god or daughter or ocean:

it no longer mattered who wrote the story

with that soft sculpting voice of theirs

like every tragedy

was written in the tune of hope.

what matters: i’m here. you’re here.

and the world is becoming tender.

not as a result but

as a journey, one soft foot

planted in front of the other.

of course in the morningtime

everything shines a little brighter

but we can get away with a little bright-eyed awe

anytime we please. the more the better.

the secrets are in the swimming pool water.

the keys are in the floorboards

humming the song of goodness

like they were born knowing it.

as if they were found with it

scrawled on their palms like a name.

it’s true. the ghosts of love haunt everything.

they’re beautiful and terrible and true.

they’re calling your name

and mine too, and soon they’ll know it

by heart, the rhythm of this lawless earth

and all of its glistening people.

don’t ask what happened to us

to make us this way. don’t ask

what dark road we are walking down.

just ask for another day.

another chance to hold the rain

in your holy hands.

another chance to mend this.

ask for the truth, and also

the sorrow. ask for the love,

warm and shining on our shoulders

like summer rain.

it’s strange, these things we receive,

the way it all works together.

all this goodness painted blue.

all the terrible things a vision in their red dresses.

it’s an oxymoron, loving everything

here and now, being so tender

to this horrible world.

so of course

it is all i am. of course it is all i have.

if two stars collided, would it mean the end of my world?

or would it just mean that two living things -

two fiery passionate breathing things -

touched each other again, without me?

i am asking to be a part of the equation.

the x or y or z. cross me out. relegate me.

but for a moment i would like to be important.

a pawn. a variable. etched in with pencil hands.

whomever. saint or sinner. add or subtract me.

more or less. sunlight, moonlight. do the old dance.

where we love, or don’t love. but the thought is there,

a variable, a butterfly flitting in and out,

saying catch me, catch me, catch me.

and i’m getting the update. it might be the end.

if i were held, i mean. like a pencil in a tender fist.

like i am a theory that’s yet to be all sorted out

but it’s rumbling in their head like a good song.

i had a dream where it didn’t end this way.

where there was more darkness and rain

humming in our bodies. i’m still dreaming,

in that soft violence, in colors that stain,

but i’m starting to see. that there’s a rhythm

to all of this. that there’s a tide

and i’m on my way to shore.

that i can’t stop moving or i’ll miss it,

the bus stop, the taxi cab, the train station

that takes me up up up to love.

it’s all an act.

our hair, i mean. the way it falls, i mean.

nobody knows it better than God, except

maybe his lonely neighbor who watches

every morning as he pulls it from his scalp.

there’s an old country song i made up just now,

where a lonely warbling woman rasps on

about the end of the world.

there is a great deal of loneliness in this poem.

it has already been mentioned two times. this poem

has holes and so all the loneliness of the world

has unfortunately began to leak in. (that’s three)

in this song about the end of the world

we were still fixing our hair. you see,

everything is already ending all the time.

we just go on wading through it,

knee deep in the muck and not a bit hopeless.

in this song there were birds, and nobody

understood this bit, why the birds were there,

living their bird lives while the rest of us

were handed an ending, and too soon.

we held it in our hands, like a corpse.

we could not fly, and this is why the birds.

someone wanted to remind us

our hope is a home-grown thing

unfeathered and without a loud call

sung into the morning.

at the end of the street the world could end.

where the road gets uneven and the fence

bears its chain-link teeth the world will end.

or he will fall in love.

or nothing will happen at all,

even with him standing there,

and nobody will build a monument

to this unmonumental moment,

and the old country song on the radio

will go on singing about the birds.

perhaps all of this at once.

perhaps the world will end

and we will just be making do.

the loneliest thing

is watching the birds from the window

(four times) and wondering how they met.

how they all decided they were meant to be.

that they would dance and sing in unison.

i found out the world was ending

when i was only thirteen.

so of course, i fixed my hair.

i went to the park,

i fed the pigeons. i placed kindness

gently in the mouth of my demise.

all this is to say,

today the end and tomorrow the end.

and tomorrow the birds.

close your eyes. it’s all happening already.

often i think i might disappear into thin air.

i’ve thought about where i would go

and every time i do i have wax wings

and i am sitting on the power lines above the town

watching everyone exist.

how do the birds do it?

sit and watch knowing they will never love

like they do in the movies?

then again, maybe they do

and we just don’t see it.

maybe in the background of every tragedy

are two grand fluttering things

falling in love.

to be the grand fluttering thing

in the background of your story

sitting on the curb like a motif.

to be grand at all,

musical and glowing,

i would dream up a thousand wax wings

and fly too close to the sun

over and over again

for a moment of holy light.

i’ve been unmade, and it’s overrated.

i much prefer being pieced together,

like this. by the sunlight.

by the thought of flight

and the way it has its own language

rabid and crazed in my body.

tugging me forward.

saying live. live. live.

i am a swimming pool cool and empty.

i am eternal summer reeking of skinned knees and heartbreak.

the skateboarders sing their drug-addled dreams into my mouth.

now listen to my hollow smoke song.

the way i harmonize with the train cars

those great metal beasts.

the way they, too, are nothing upon nothing.

now i dance to the sound of the terrible city.

now i heal the earth with my clunking stone feet.

i confess i am alive for the lover boys

who sit on the sun baked cement

in the dying summer and ache relentlessly.

i am alive for the color -

i am alive for i am the popsicle melting on your leg

blood red and sickly sweet

unkillable and perfect.

i am sitting far away

and incredibly close

and watching the world love.

if i’ve found the answer,

it’s not written in my language.

i speak in tones of sun and sweat.

my accent lilts like lost lovers.

my words are empty apartment buildings

full of adrift summer air

and yes, the air is adrift too,

and yes, this too has its own song.

we call it something to drum out

when the silence gets unbearable.

i mean to say,

i wanted to live until it happened.

then i wanted it even more.

the world undid me like a slow coil

left me in piles on the dirt.

the earth is a good place to start

and a good place to end.

so here i present my undoing.

so here i lie down on the soft grass

with my soft body

and ask for the jaws of the sun.

loneliness is embarrassing. it’s important. it’s love. it’s blood.

it’s a god rushing in your ears like an ugly train track

for the unlucky, of course.

i stole this loneliness from you

and made it mine.

i took on the world’s loneliness

and became a beast.

i grew into him easily.

i knew what it meant to be foul.

the children were right -

the world is good

but all stories must have a villain.

the world is good and i crawl in its walls

like a horrible thing.

there is a rotten-eyed god

who kisses me to sleep

leaves me lovestruck

smokes a cigarette while i lie awake.

lover, i am at this intersection,

waiting in the busy crossroads of time

to cross the street.

find me in the darkness,

find me at the red light,

find me as a drunk driver,

just find me.

do not rest

until i am in your apartment

shivering from the rain

like a wet dog.

will you save me?

is this something i can ask of you?

find me in rush hour traffic.

on a crowded street

lost in translation

and messy at the lines.

dare i ask you to decode me?

to sit me down on your moth-eaten couch

and read me like a worn-out book?

i do contain stories

but you may not want to read them.

they are sad, mostly.

i need to write myself out of this one.

i need to write a novel, or a prayer.

something to chew on

when the days get cold.

i’ve learned to hold loneliness in my mouth

like a cat with a mouse

like prey

like the battle is over, which, of course,

is a lie.

i’ve learned all the falsehoods in the world

and taken them on as my own.

when you strip me down

and put me to bed

there will be nothing left of me

to kiss softly.