the space above my ears.

Big Fire Song

When I'm sober and finally have something to say, the soliloquies I sing stretch for miles under the Andes sun, chestnut made ocean blue when the sun hits it just right.

They disappear among the trees, wind, and rock, but they are out there somewhere, existing in blue.

They speak of how I strive for a disconnected love where you will remain safe and mystery will be infinitely supplied for us.

They say you strive for the kind where our flesh has been melted together in places and if either of us tries to run from the other, we'll skin ourselves alive.

I strive to love a supporting role, unfortunately, and you strive to love a damaged author.

I am that, but it is not what you think it is.

It's a lot of washing the same dishes over and over again only for them to be dirtier every time they are set down beside the sink, it's a lot of screaming and never being heard.

Sometimes I fall so deep into myself that I cannot leave my bed.

It's not romantic, I haven't showered in days, all I do is complain, but you don't know how it feels to be weak.

All I do is wallow in self-pity and guilt, marinating in it like meat.

You don't worry about such things because if you did, you'd have died. I have to re-crush every insect, re-sweep all the floors, ball up the cobwebs into a sticky white mass, paste back the moth-eaten curtains.

We'll call it spring cleaning, we'll scrub every surface until we can see our own faces, distorted, but clear, being echoed back to us.

Throw open the doors, breathe in the sunlight and the rosemary haze.

The air is salty, someone is grilling in the backyard.

This mask of breezy afternoons numbs the burn of acid at the back of my throat and behind my eyes.

It erodes thoughts and anxiety, it erodes awareness, it's killing two birds instead of one.

Dahmer in the bathroom, Dahmer on the couch, Dahmer at our doorstep.

I will not face the possibility that this is all we were supposed to discover.

All that chaos silenced by a pen cap, rot and rust sheathed in a shell of tin.

The awareness that you're missing time in the library, sunlight spilling over the mahogany tables and chairs.

A comfortable nook at the corner-most window, wood ledge softened by faded crimson cushions.

Two pairs of pupils locking contact across the street, 90 degrees adjacent to the city floor- who wrote this, F Scott Fitzgerald?

Art is just a tether.

That doesn't sound like me, that's not something I'd say.

I know nothing of art, I'm sure I don't.

It's grotesquely self-absorbed not to believe in aliens, I think,

But other than that, I know very little about this place I've grown up in.

I thought I knew something, for a time, back when I'd say "The worst things are always so very enticing and planets are much smaller than they seem."

Unfortunately, at this time I also wholeheartedly believed every grain of sand on every beach was a plant and I'd come home from the beach convinced there were galaxies in between my toes.

We can't trust a mind when it starts to create these things.

We will never really know if I was onto something about how beauty is bribery.

There's nothing quite like fake remembrance; what are you without it?

There's nothing like hollow cheeks and a narrow nose on a face in a loud room, cup dented in where fingers grip the plastic.

I used to think i just wanted somebody to write manuscripts about,

Someone whose lips you could describe for hours, the feeling, the shape, the color, the electricity crackling between theirs and your own when they touch,

But you can write a story about anybody,

And I'd be stupid to waste this perfectly good stranger.

By the looks of it, he is very much not all here.

Eyes rolling like dice, spinning like he's fractal falling, dropping further and faster while trying to see enough to tell all the colors apart from each other.

He's very far within now, so I best watch my step around his sinkhole.

We look at each other and our stomachs drop simultaneously, heartbeats picking up, heat rising.

We both think they've found me.

He thinks about running, I think at least it will be quick.

He is the latent content of a dream, standing right in front of me, all put together, legible.

His stance and the way he keeps his hands in his pockets convey a message to me.

By not running in the opposite direction, I have conveyed a message to him.

It's an orchestra, the many tones of energy roping the two of us together, drawn like flies to light.

We're being warned by the outside, the room filling with a smell like a baking desert with the stink of reptiles cooking on the ground, but it's not enough to break our attention.

That's how it should be, lather and nothing else.

The misprinted parts are where it gets romantic.

Someone walks up to you and guarantees you the world, what do you say?

Do you accept?

I know I wouldn't, not unless I'd unscrewed my head a bit beforehand to let everything inside me breathe.

If it were offered in your voice, I might be too stunned to reply at all.

Great, look what you've done.

Now I'm up gazing at the kinds of technicolor monsters cornering us searing light.

Ragdoll alone in the attic, devolving temptations

And to the edge of a bridge, one foot hovering over existence and/or nonexistence, chased out of an elevator, denied by every permutation.

A crazed face, round and swollen as if behind a fishbowl, through the peephole of the hotel door,

Bloody nose, wobbly teeth, slow-rolling cradles on abandoned streets.

And here comes Jupiter with a stiff paper smile, dry and ashen.

How much of him have I made into you, and how much of himself is he really?