through my apartment wall I can hear my neighbor writing on a chalkboard,
only a couple of scratches every night,
and I think he must be making tally marks:
another block of time passed stacked on all other passed time, segmented for ease of reference or glorification or
erasure...

there are cobwebs inside the gaps of my joints --
I am 21 and I have been kissed and I have
tripped and fallen and burned myself on hot metal and
drunk too much sobbing from the alcohol sloshing inside my organs and dissolving holes in my soft tissue and I have
tried Christian novels when I felt aimless and lonely and
been undressed by people I don't speak to anymore and
my body is a haphazard concoction of chemicals,
some ash and some poison accumulating already
into something irreversible...

my body and my mind is a sandbox I've been ******* with in pitch black, hoping a fistful that I throw one day will at least hit a light switch,
and I must have packed a pile of sand too high because now she misses you,
all her concavities ache for you... and
I'm not sure she knows who she misses, in particular,
just that she used to have a hand to hold in the dark,
and that she doesn't anymore.

the sunwarmed stone singes the long-dormant nerves in my adult fingers and suddenly I
remember what pear trees used to smell like in June,
as backyard swing rope burns emerge on my inner thighs underneath my slacks
and sweat cooled by dusk on the back of my neck.

the heat accumulated over years of summers
is my loss of virginity too, and I realize now that pear trees
in August smell like ***,
like sweat and shame.

there is a handful of jolly ranchers and pack of cigarettes
on his bedside table,
to which, afterwards, he says, "take what you want"
and I wish that I could as freely as he took me,
but I am no longer angry at men for this because
I know I could just as easily have done the same.

we all have to decay somehow,
after the pleasure like candy we take from each other
and **** out of the earth to consume in glut,
and after suffocating each other with our selfishness --
what more appropriate fate than sugar and smoke?

so hesitantly I take one of each to his balcony and do my penance,
and hear him come up behind me to take my hips into his palms
and when I feel sick I think about my mother's pear tree,
despite its history and crimes still flowering every spring.

I want to exist in a way that floods my capillaries with
the silver sparkling sea foam that erupts out of the sky-colored lake
and fizzles out like I do,
like I will.

take me with you,
seagulls and woman in bohemian jewelry
and billowing brown—

I want to exist in a way that I will never.

until my palms can absorb crocuses,
crumble into sand and soil for them to grow networks of roots
in my bloodstream, I will cry by the water
and every time

I see men with white beards and squinted blue eyes riding bicycles,
years swirling behind them as they pass because
they already know how to live,
how to accumulate life distilled from tumult.

it is too much for my drying throat to hear the orchestra
without being able to drink its dripping scarlet passion,
to nourish myself with it,

but I could not live without the smell of music.

I don’t know what I came to do here,
so take me with you,
ocean and seagulls and bohemian woman and old men on bicycles with secrets, and
take me with you, violins, in a way that you cannot,
nor that I can even describe to you.

I have a body with purple crushed fingernails,
with burn scars and with joints secured by bolts.
I find soot and oil behind my knees
and in the creases of my sunburnt elbows,
and I tuck it underneath my tongue for nourishment,
paint black the fleshy bottom of my mouth.

In the daylight we work,
in the moonlight we drink and stumble to bed spinning.
We wash our hands in gasoline
and our faces with dirt and kiss our women goodnight.

But coated in whiskey and grime and spit from the mouths of mechanics and truckers and anyone else who wanted me,
my tongue is drunk and slowed but still refuses to forget what it is.
I am, unfortunately, a body that courses with concertos of amber glowing cobblestone and morning sunlight sparkling blue and sprawling green vineyards and everything unmarred and more vivid than life,
and my tongue knows I can only love things that taste like music.