it's only a chorus if you repeat it.

dear you:

i have never written you a letter
because words fade fast with time
and i want nothing permanent
to remind us that we're not.
i believe your mouth is a stormcloud
and i've always loved the rain,
how are you soft electricity
like a lightbulb wrapped in velvet?

[circuits and veins, we are a design
meant purely for ocean winds, love.]

dear me:

you spend hours carving names
into your heart like a bad joke,
but you've put it away now
set softly on a tabletop somewhere
mid-Atlantic
and you can breathe again.
ask yourself how you'll manage--

[answer that you don't care.]

things to be Undone

i am a reactor,
violent fever
and i fit snugly between tendons
like night air,
smoke in a wineglass
and we are seething;

[seek us out in the stars,
obscurity and galaxy]

i speak straight into veins,
words a heady obsession
and you love what they do
to your breathing;
you know our hands
are a ridiculous
stunning
contrast
and i can't get enough--

[can you feel us?
we shake in tandem.]

back to Multiplication.

stifling,
oxygen is a scandal
just off your lips
new like the world
but less like traffic--
inkonhands,
has no one told you we're an artist
dying for a brush of red,
wet on our bones like a
secret?
[keep it fresh, keep us here]

stack me up, i'm a library--
burn me down and breathe me in
ashes to the wind
is a dirty joke,
you will never fly
[how is your head, dear?]

pounding pavement,
praying for a prelude,
prolonging paragraphs of
pedantic parries--

perhaps we are beautiful,
and love, we are quite
in-finite.