disrhythmic

he came with flowers and grew gardens beneath roots of her chlorine hair she left him teeming with a whole ecosystem closed between his arms

you were the sky i was the sea, with the sun                 - apart. in an offering of light you wore the night as i called your stars down                   into me.

It turns out that hearts break with hardly a sound, just the soft sigh of settling in for a cold, cold night- lonesome large a glacier slipping into the sea, trading silence for silence.

orange morning riverside in the wind reeds bend like backs yours arches like a bridge in my breath and my two lips cross your soft skin connection to reach the end the heartland open and waiting for me

1) Joe's become a functioning alcoholic, which I'm okay with. As long as he drives in a straight line, I don't refuse our meandering journeys: around the cornfields surrounding Plano, where the suburbanites raise chickens and flirt with country music. I like Johnny Cash but Joe blasts something drawling, with an acoustic bass thumping to the time of a drunk tractor's sparking cables, returning from the bar and driving crookedly behind us. Joe passes me the joint, then takes a long swig from his flask. 2) He was a heavy guy before the cocaine, but after I moved from the city, he went clean, and there's something about the rounded slope

I will slough off all my feelings for you like a second skin for somebody else to slip into

bolts struck my eyes from some god's thunder wound up in my dry sockets and cracked me into a desert prophet. I came undone like a rattlesnake would hiss at its incinerated tail - god clapped as I fell into myself, wailed for I to come back to (and) that night I sizzled from the roots of my hair like a wild-eyed traveler jolted out of startled air.

When the mare went blind my heart clouded like her eyes she walked calm along her dark path she learned step up, step down I led her by the forelock her trust like the moon between my hands

"you fell first and i followed, tumbled like bricks in the wake of your admiration," is the story i told, and you agreed, not remembering the night i've tried to dissolve: when i lay on your bed, dampened sheets, counted perfections, cut my sleeve, and realized— admiration was my muriatic acid when you hardly knew my foundation: i collapsed like bricks already unstable.

He wakes up in Vietnam every night, boot-clad feet trudging over mined ground, trigger finger numb, back sore, fatigue drenched from the monsoons, and he prays to go home to her. He finds himself next to her every morning, dark bags under her eyes telling him his twitching kept her awake again. At breakfast she throws the dishes and cries as the china shatters against the wall— cries that she’s living in a combat zone with a man who’s battling himself. "Is there anything more destructive than war?" she asks, and he looks at her and says, “Love."