Was this meant to be?

 

I search his face for something a mirror won’t show without unfolding a paper crane or

explaining the definition of flight by whatever we can’t feel creasing bands of muscles in our

backs.

 

People only ever speak in somniloquy: we all make art out of the pockets of life no other hands

can reach into; we made a whole world on top of something we can’t trust anyone else is seeing

but we’d spend a fortune to hear reiterated, promised that they were there with us when it

happened.

 

Was I supposed to go digging and turn up my own corpse where I thought would be treasure or

should I have curled next to him and waited till meadow grasses tapped my teeth, fetching what

they could of my smile to spread before the sun again?

 

Walking by hyacinths, I smell the frailty in everything we attach meaning to, a perfume in the

remembrance of so many names for something that comes back again and again.

 

Handsome eyes might see me blind and soon enough I’ll be reciting the names of dead pets,

trying to count how many inhalations I took between moments when I felt safe and knew I was

standing in one place at one time.

 

I never know when I’m not tessellating myself like a head of Romanesco, so many cataclysms

making meanings out of an obsession with growth even unto breaking outstretched boughs with

too many blossoms and no plan to support the fruit.

 

How could you, as a ghost in an internet where gravity is only a guideline and the concept of

wings is still too derivative, lame yourself—think your form only makes sense when it is

balanced on a chariot of twigs?

 

How long will you let the concept of motion chase you?

 

There is a word in the thunder, a name in the storm, but, horny as you are, you wonder why

everyday cannot be a tempest, running in all directions for the bolt that would bring you to life.

 

Would you balk if you found a lightning rod cocked above you now?

 

Will you wait until your fickleness is pointed out thrice and the hollow of your hand is filled by a

Hologram?

 

You won’t escape yourself and you don’t know what makes a good hug, so your worst

nightmares are mundane scenes, times when you must ask whether you yourself are friend or

Foe.

 

The toads are chirping under the skin of reality, but you ignore them, thinking that their bedtime

prayers are something not meant for you to hear.

 

It’s time to stop, smash the alarm, salt the west, and let the sun foam dead at the horizon, gather

your clouds and your stars and pretend their outlines mean nothing too, that the drag queens

mouthing their prophesies are only parroting the words and not the fate of your nation, the death

and rebirth and scheduled slaughter of every person bold enough to stitch parenthetical phrases

into the next hot fashion.

 

Yes, you want to know, you want the walls to crawl over you till you too are mortar and brick

and whatever needs shelter comes meek to your door as the wrath of life and the bereft of every

generation imagines your windows are gazing at their little lives, that your halls lead labyrinthine

to locked chambers, and that you demand sentience, personhood, and rights to open them.

 

The dead are calling to you: scores of raised voices tell the intimate news of floating masks and

the cartoon outlines of women and children, all the unwilling of war to speak first, all the

grandparents and the hatreds they would not see die with them, all the nameless who regret

forgetting themselves and those who wish they would be left to slumber.

 

Isn’t it beautiful to decay and become what you always were?

 

But why do you weep in the small victories, sing lullabies at midday, and promise the moon you

will love her better only to spend your anniversary cuddling the hand mirror and the rolled bill?

 

Who told you success was why desert stones sign their names in dust?

 

Or that anyone should admire the mantis for not just chasing the rush of sex with a cigarette?

 

Do you think you’re the only one who wonders what magmas dye each planet a new color?

 

Is there a point to any of it?

 

Hello?

 

Take a breath.

 

Hold it until you can count your heartbeats.

 

Let it go.

 

Breathe in slowly.

 

Let it go.