eternityvisions

it all went up in flames and I never realized how much of me was incinerated until I put fingers to keys and hated every word that tried to push tried to shove its way out. I burned it down in the name of the Lord in the name of virtue they said: “we’re sorry, your soul is too loud” “you pull us all down with you” “your heart is such a fucking vortex, why can’t you just lift yourself out?” I lit a match held it up to poems that I believed were named “selfish” “narcissist” “soul-sucker” “venom-spitter” I closed my eyes but I saw the flame inside

After eight, the city is made of some dark and arid crystal, an amethyst drought to dry your lips and tongue and make a moonscape of your eyes. The sky’s too polluted for the stars – we put them into the neon and the broken glass. I am not used to the heavens being so close to hand or so cutting to my soft bare skin. I am used to skies like oceans, and oceans as black and vast as night. Sometimes, but not always, fingers twitch for the sweet wet cold of a harbour town, where the silos range white and ugly like whalebone against the slap and sigh of sea, where my father goes walking by the train tracks, by the wild and bleed