I.
and i look at your lapels
and your dreams on their
hind legs; your indoor scribbles
that summon up futures
(spin them out like cogs). just
parts of things eclipsed
by the promise of completion
II.
and i might have wondered (in
cogs of my own) if you can see a whole
person flicker out overnight, scour a
glimpse of a lunar spectacle corporeal only
in service to a moment in time
(but perhaps
neither of us are fully formed
and perhaps we are all recruits of time
and perhaps permanence is just a folly,
maybe all we are is folly, is parts. of broken things).
III.
so how is it then that a person
can find a whole person in the flotsam
of another person’s words, just
a mottled sum of their own parts? you’re my
twenties (i catch a glimpse of undelivered
heartbreak). how easy
if your first love was always your last?
we talk mirrors and greasy and limitless,
conjure paris from the backseat
of our bedroom walls,
sometimes we summon up
a house on a pier and lodge our
futures there in the embryonic
glow of its basement. do you know
how i can still get something infinite
in the semantic traces of your embrace?
this is some pathetic pride i have, this pride
in knowing that place in your arms is mine
(i feel this heart is just a storage room now;
empty boxes, so much space).
IV.
and it’s all just a symptom, i think, of my
lingering adolescence. but these days
i know i know nothing (isn’t that just
what an adult cannot? so smug
in their indifference). i can’t bring myself
to feel so hopeless when everywhere
the world screams out incalculable
possibilities in tongues. i see pins on
a map, lines traced out in names —
the world owes me nothing
but broken things, and yet
i find my life pressed
up beside yours again and i
i cant help it, these
fancies of it all fill my head:
dreams, futures, piers, you
subjugate me with your starred up
eyes, i see washed up shadows
on your collar. movement
in this somewhere. belonging
to you gives me a glimpse
of so many redolent daybreaks
i’ve only seen in curtain calls:
i hope you know how you
passed through doors
you’re a tossing in my mind
(always) things i
overheard in whispers and
(come nightfall)
pictured in the silence
on my ceiling —
junkyard yearnings
clandestine castles
in the sky
(is it tactless
to hope
that’s enough?)