i had never felt much this the elk rut picasso blue stage trauma bond galore remote viewing when you spoke to me truffle salt parfait copd loss prevention harm reduction all concussions the repercussions the reaper comin its always a murderous plucking becoming afraid of myself love you bottomless pit shove you heart clover wrapped cracked like a giftbox non ornamental halo slices on rotation 3 can tell i lost it i was split in thirds gown bloomed with fever patterns detonated mid embrace a system reboot in flesh they demand im blocking my caveman brain with blackout poetry im healing by becoming less legible parasitic firmware i hate it like every bullet fired in a holy war and they reload between sermons sent me mirror selfies of herself crying am i gaslit or groomed either way im subscribed corrupted wing fractal jaw unhinged dreamt of ancestors crawling back in fire to delete me lovebombed now i owe 9 ghost organs still being shadowstalked by my dead mutual that borrows blood without asking your such a drain i logged off and the ghosts started clapping hallucinations updated last night their more interactive every ad knows im sad they put softer fonts i tried to block deities they made 6 alts hit the joy venom, now i flinch when im seen bit in pierrots library told im overdue you blinked once and called me a mistake it was whispered from the fridge vent the dream had ads that's how i knew it was real sells real death with pastel pop-ups started replying in all lowercase public trauma as a content unlock tried to confess but the app kept autofill crying pill with knives and we joked as it stabbed him logged off for three days and came back feral i said i felt nothing it prescribed leeches and pushed an ad for luxury grief kits its all spirals and all teeth i spat on the vampires lens every time im blue a tentacle reaches through my screen and pets my hair its wet always wet tentacles never strangle they just hold you in place mourned by something that needed my absence to survive she said its not abuse if i laugh after it i say i love her cos i dont know the password to leave it chirped, then laid eggs in my palm the therapist says we're progressing it feeds then it thanks me

everything broken wants, mostly, to be told and to believe the telling that it was once whole the caddisfly built its small house by the grain and I have built mine the same way out of the broken things, and the house held and the house was the work and the work was the grief a house they live inside kept well against the cold in better order than i could do it alone i live now inside everyone i have loved kept in the gaze of my own gathered dead who turn slowly to keep me in view the bird sings only the songs of birds that are gone at least they are sung at least once more the earth is the color of what i have not yet said to you the not-saying is the love the horror and the love poem are the same thing there has only ever been one hand im the archive of how you said my name when I die the archive ends, nothing to be done small figure carries the tune you used to hum at the window when you thought no one heard i had heardyou I had kept it i held what I was given to hold. im at the writing bureau, paying household bills its evening closing time, ill sweep the floor in the corner i swept a small pile of dust in the corner, i looked close, is not dust but a small audience the figures microscopic dressed for the theater, seated in rows watching a small performance take place i wont disturb it i never will your a small lighthouse on a remote coast in a country village. small chapel of st. anne on the altar, small candles never relit im in my garden in late fall and as the leaves fall they never quite land they pause approximately 3 feet above the lawn suspended drifting lightly and they stay and By the end of the afternoon the garden has a low ceiling of suspended leaves the lawn visible beneath in winter the leaves drift high to form a roof in spring they return upward into the trees i never mind that my garden has its own rules i like it that way a wedding photograph in a small frame the couple, formally posed the bride seated, the groom standing behind the photo is from 90 years ago as years pass, the couple in the photo age slowly year by year the hair grays aged at the same rate as their living counterparts today, the bride in the photos alone the groom has faded she is looking out from the photo at her living self who is alone on the other side of the room im at the shaving mirror every morn noticed the bottle of my late wife's perfume which has sat on the shelf for years untouched is now, by some operation half empty someone, is wearing the perfume i dont investigate im glad its being used i hopes she likes the smell of herself but iv become aware of a very faint second face behind the mirror watching me shave the face is patient and warm the face is for me the face nods back rinse the razor the face fades the day begins its late evening and im in the recital hall playing a slow nocturne

the hotel stalker room 9 booked up as per usual... the understudy performing alone in the dark wings hugged me with a smile. i woke up cocooned thats the wrong room service on the tray go tell the desk clerk with the uncomfortable laugh the thing in the vents has been humming since last week they sent someone to look they were different when they came back not wrong exactly just: slightly further from themselves than when they went they said: there's nothing there but the humming never stopped the landlord said: to ignore it cos every second draft contains the ghost of the first the institution cannot permit the wound to be optional except: in the margin relative to the moth's flight the moon candle mimic photocopied and glitched the last photograph taken three days before she is laughing at something outside the frame the thing outside the frame is gone but the laugh is still here in the photo on the shelf in the room she is still laughing at the thing outside the frame that took her with it a bird landed on the sill it looked in, saw them, and left. just chill or burst in flames mid-confession call it absolution lag drank from a stream choked in violet algae screamed wrong names while dying. they were muted and dubbed then livestreamed from a reclaimed plague hospice autopsy room is empty, but the instruments are damp after 90 years of rx lavender changed the script i was hired by a research institute to report from the border of sleep tonight: something large moving through the peripheral I cannot report further I am being taken she collected small stones from the beach which arrived in a plain envelope as a taxidermist i kept for myself just one small bird which i did not stuff which i allowed to do what birds do after its: everything my profession prevents id claimed i could hear them at dusk between the last call of what remained and the dark and meet a woman who translated birdsong or il collect the expressions of the newly dead not for cruelty for accuracy the expression: he said is the last honest thing the face does which the living face could never achieve there's a room in my apartment that only exists at night

lot 45: the bell rings as it rings one careful owner but the rope still , no bids? but this the butlers retirement toast undertaker's invoice and the family physician's note are you ok? im coming over, please respond something looking at me from your window its waving it waves like you i was concerned the housemaid left without wages or her coat an unspecified location sent a postcard dont disrupt the plot, disregard, i am well left the mechanism on the floor of the bell tower hell showered down upon me and i fear for the form the congregation learned quickly what the letters are for asked to dig a grave in the east field not the churchyard paid in old coins found it odd but some things you just dig and don't ask when the museum closes theirs nothing to discuss i just always follow what the wax wants please make your way to the exit please ensure you are one of the ones that leaves what the mud kept , kept everything, it jus keeps i am telling you that I am fine i am not telling you what fine means round these parts the situation: unchanged casualties: see attached morale: we are singing, heart shape: good size boulders are going down regardless at my birthday party a very special cake but i dont want talk about it mirror in the sealed east wing with the occupied chair the groundskeeper tends both with equal care found in the writing desk confessions unsent my well echoes before the stone fell

im the figure in the background the gravediggers grandson and i felt the dog ears droop as your nails tapped on the glass of my transom watch isadores poison bursting from my breath like the last snowfall in late march made the coffin with the same care as the wedding chest which is: loplop's whole job the sphinx: threw herself from the cliff the sculptor's hand stayed warm in the wax pressed flat the scorpion in the glove in the decommissioned lighthouse i learned as if it was a cellar where the wine aged the well doing what the well does plunge into curdled cleft this is ordinary devotion not because i love you but this specific cup of tea brought without asking me ordinary hands not the sculptor's not the surgeon's just: the hands that made our sunday meal those arent ordinary hands infact gold skinned devil treasure knitting infinity valves before me hesitations the moment before the tide decides to turn this is a portrait of my 3rd language which tells you something about where the self actually lives the beekeeper tending the winter hive the blank edge left blank ordinary goodbye learned the rope learned the weight did not learn: what the bell does to itself from the inside the body the morning the thing being made insomniac at the window waiting for the unnamed task small kindnesses kept and cut from the reed bed the byproduct: the warmth the process wastes nothing the specific weight of someone in the next room which you only understand as weight when the room is empty not dramatic the body discovering specific dimensions of absence which it measures before the mind is ready to assist im dumb but have the knowledge of how you took her tea which is: the most useless thing to know about you when your gone not the grand things but which side of the bed you slept on which my body still honors alone what the clock counted number of times the person looked at it hoping for a different number than the one it showed that bread is just: time applied to flour that most things are just: time applied to something 3am is the correct time to know doesn't matter if you hear me the morning requires song

the slow conversion of a white feather, found on a doorstep into the unspoken understanding that something will visit a church interior, gothic, mid-service. the congregation seated a violin left in a meadow overnight, found in the morning slightly tuned by the dew. a room with all the furniture intact, but the wallpaper has been replaced with a single enormous reproduction of a medical illustration of a kidney a field at noon. a figure in the field, walking. the figure is the same figure walking in the same field at noon, but the field is now a meadow inside a snow globe, and the globe is held by your hand you are the small fold at the edge of the sheet was a thing my hands learned from yours a widow's parlor mourning crepe widow sits with her embroidery on the hoop a barber's shop the hair on the floor the hair assembling itself very slow, into the small portrait of the barber as a kid the barber sweeps the hair into a pan the portrait is destroyed the next portrait will begin this outline is benign in the sense of not yet personal effects were mailed without consent to the unfeatured face on the bench the puncture in the sky widened, im the perch you made promises to that you wont keep like the descent of a piano through a stairwell i miss the absent-minded ankle hooked over mine in bed miss the way your thumb would brush my wrist while you thought a man in a kitchen pours coffee. the coffee is also a small slow stream of bees the bees dont sting the man doesn't notice them. the bees are entering the cup. the cup is filled the cup is offered to no one the cup waits you are the second voice in every conversation i have alone come back through the door that the previous stanza left ajar a garden party in which every guest is correctly dressed for the period and is also, simultaneously, drowning, the drowning happening on dry land in the garden, while the conversation continues a horse, photographed from the front in the parlor of a victorian house wearing on its head the ceremonial wig of an eighteenth-century judge a woman in evening dress, mid-sentence with the head of a moth a landscape with a small mountain in the middle distance the mountain is, on closer inspection, an enormous lung breathing slowly the landscape otherwise normal the lung is the only mountain in the landscape a railway platform, gaslit man waits with a small valise the train arrives the train is mirror on wheels the doors open the man enters the man inside the mirror entering from the other side enters at the same moment the doors close the mirror departs the platform is empty on the windowsill, a row of small porcelain figures. the figures are correct in every detail except that each figure in place of its head, a small clock the clocks are set to different hours the hours are when each figure was last loved by someone now dead a cathedral interior, empty a cathedral interior, full of birds the same cathedral, with the birds now in stained glass on the windows but the glass is always breathing slightly a railway carriage interior, first class three passengers, properly dressed the window shows a landscape passing landscape is the inside of a mouth the teeth large in the middle distance the molars at the horizon the passengers do not look out they just read the landscape continues to pass you are the small permission iv giving myself to remain

lower your gaze when addressing the perfumed the room is filled with flowers, none were placed there euthanasia chair smelled like lilies and bleach vomited thread again. its nesting up inside me windstorm deposits a spiral of photographs something knocks from inside the fridge. i knock back dog eared page of cups, little melo born parasol in the soil, opens by itself locket on my neck clicks open on its own woke up in plague lace. rats had brought breakfast doctor said i was cured. then handed me a shovel bathwater refused to drain. it wasn't done yet opened ribcage gently. looking for the off switch blood clotted in the shape of a question mark (flipped) mask soaked in rosewater & menthol blood type updated to neon+ might move into a photo booth in a dead mall every file on my desktop is renamed don't every mirror in the house shows me at a different age another suicide attempt turned into a fashion haul aimed center mass wore clothes today. felt like cosplay for a dead species. pulse syncs with factory noise. carry a watch that stopped the day everyone else died trained on love letters and autopsy reports they know what your password would have been the gloves hide more than just the bruise catalogues every insect that's ever crawled across me cos my arms molt monthly every eye contact is a data leak. chirps in old Japanese their belly is a hatch–inside, a garden growing backwards deluxe fade includes petal confetti and i wander through the city in a hazmat suit under victorian streetlight

fang channel bends ninety degrees inside the hollow tooth The spitting cobra aiming at the witness what candy cane Viper in this season's colorway the most frightening thing about the live broadcast the almost right version of the person you lost this is an issue hr is trying to address antarctic creature vaguely human in the worst way the tbd boutique: spring collection hospital has no exits as a feature not a fault the water is always already warm no previous tenant they said whose prints are these its like you don't understand what the kitchen is for the hotel stalker closes the notebook cos this shit was above his pay grade its whatever loplop becomes the bookworm survived the bomb alone with all the books in all the world bent to read his glasses broke but here is the version nobody made the glasses broke he sat among the books he couldn't read he sat anyway the way the man in the pit sits with the sand and after a while he picked up a book felt the weight of a thing made to be held he held it the way you hold something you love when you can no longer see it clearly which is the oldest and most honest kind of reading the formal portrait, three-quarter length her hands are folded properly at her waist where her eyes should be two small open wounds looking out of the painting fresh edges raw visitors pass it without remark where my face should be, the front of my skull removed cleanly to display moss, a few small ferns, a single beetle slowly traversing a pebble and as the host i converse with my guests the beetle continues its very slow walk and the maid enters with sherry im in the botanist's greenhouse rows of plants each labeled in Latin it feels nice a pair of lovers in a parlor, sitting close holding hands dressed for an afternoon date from between them, where their joined hands rest a thick black liquid drips slowly onto the carpet pooling neither one looks at the pool they are gazing at each other they speak soft aaww the carpet is being ruined. a small dried umbilical cord hangs ending in a knot, dark with age. its private the only piece of jewelry she wears. off to the confectioner's shop gazing at the pastries in the glass case the lovers hair is composed of small honeybees by the hundred coiled into a braid in the shape of a 19th-century coiffure the honey, when it eventually falls onto the host's correct evening jacket umm is removed by the maid without comment yea surgical theater the patient's chest is open inside the cavity, in place of standard anatomy the sea small ship on the horizon inside the patient the surgeon waits for the ship to clear the field as assistants stand by surgeon's hands operating on close inspection are not his hands but the hands of an older woman with the rings of someone's grandmother and mottled with age spots. a judge in his robes at the high bench visible through the eye sockets a small flock of moths circulates in the cavity of his skull the moths are pale occasionally exit through the mouth when he speaks and re-enter through the nostrils he delivers his ruling the court adjourns in the grand ballroom, mid-waltz, where her head should be, a brass gramophone horn and we converse as we dance other couples make small accommodations to pass

found the leak behind the drywall silver nitrate films ignited on a small stack of mail drop was from waist height the Old Coat Check got off at the wrong floor never could quite keep up with the tempo in the cathedral made of negative space i was worn as the pews where the mourners sat the unsaid corrections the silent objections parked in the funeral home lot beyond handle, hinge, the satisfying click doors: fully functional for the bereaved the caterer: made sure the widow got fed twice old Motel neon still works on good nights for the last member of the social club repurposed ferris wheel and no one read the plaque maintained for the occasion that did not come but the passengers: board or disembark what the furnace was able to reduce was something i wanted to tell across decades sleepwalking architect impossible rooms: i dont drink no more i just gargoyle hello this is a courtesy call for whom the pendulum swung slightly behind the table: finally cleared for what comes next 3 crow birds hit the window and smudged yesterday there was 2 tomorrow wel see whats up something is coming down the road armored hearse drove by without a load i tried to write about the upstairs hallway served their occupants with a Prose block there is a stain on the ceiling above the bed that looks like it does not spread i sleep under it i have for years i dont look up it does not drip i keep finding hair on the pillow its not mine long hair i do not know who is sleeping over tho the chair at the table i never sit in is warm at the back as if someone has been the chair has its mark spider in my coffee bathroom faucet runs warm without any touch on the 9th day of each month im trying to be polite about this wallpaper peeling in the same place every time i patch it scarecrows head fell off continues to rotate a bird landed on my head and stayed

man in a gas station bathroom had cried i heard him through the wall washed my hands and left then i sat on a bench at the edge of the lake fed crusts to a swan i had grown to mistake for someone it had loved long ago. the swan did not know the swan didnt a cloud shaped like the day i had not yet had where i held a stranger's coat at the door of a wake learned that octopi have neurons in their arms. like a hand on my shoulder didnt turn to see. a small hand at the window from 9 floors up. bird with no shadow in the chimney its loplop ambrose bierce fka maldoror dogs whining at the closet small wet footprints arizona ghost radio my phone rang once like breath against the back of my neck in a cold room a figure at the top of the stairs with a lovenote figure at the foot of the bed i didn't look at it man in the painting moved closer to the foreground note inside an apple apple was sealed someone sitting at my dinner in an empty chair who left when i picked up my fork name written on the inside of a windowpane in dust bell in the basement that only rings when i cough handprints on the ceiling campfire in the bathtub child's drawing pushed under my front door. it is the case, in the matter of small ongoing griefs the party will adjust the route of the morning walk and change the channel when a song begins i don't know what i'm doing i keep thinking that i do it and then i look down and i'm not i don't know when i started doing the something else i was doing the thing and now I'm not

i watched as the water rose like 90 years of the worst moments which the groundskeeper swept around there is nothing to fix the chapel saturated with prepackaged slop the wind picked up the leaves agreed my hat blew off chased it half a block put it back on. i was slightly pleased the old theater usher he kept the ol flashlight not for sentiment cause noone asked to return it might be bludgeoned in the midst of a brawl after the source of the habit is gone the nightwatchmens replacement looked unwell beyond that: you know as much as i do small boat in a large harbor doing what boats do the grocery clerk asked how i was i said fine. she said good we meant it both times except somebody wanted to die its either or breathe the spores of a small key found in the garden i dont know what it opens i wont look for the lock woman whistled at a dog that was not hers watered the flowers on the windowsill like old friends man at the bus stop coughed and apologized he coughed again we all pretend not to notice the bus came he boarded the cough boarded with him dog at the end of his life with a tail wag i still come when you call i do what i can for what, by whom puew puew zing zing kablamo you got me right in the heart in the final act by treating it as such the neighbors windchime doesn't move much these days man offered me a piece of gum i took it did not speak the gum was good light through the window makes a shape on the floor and some dogs jus know about the warm spot slept on the bench with a hat on my face the hat rose and fell with my breath small bird at the feeder ate one seed and left everything was as it should be a woman in the rain did not run she walked at her usual pace. she went inside she arrived wet the rain had been part of her walk this is a kind of grace that i still learn i respect the limits of her department

something black and winged poured out the client told me keep filming muscle peeling back like pages read too fast my apartment flooded with kudzu my therapist switches modes streamed for ad revenue wrapped in a weighted blanket the weight kept increasing plague doctors who never healed, only observed the dead here don’t rot they just rust and they lit a candle in the rain as the wick bled blue we dug the trench too deep thought the sky was gone used the dead for cover they didn’t stop humming i begged the machine to stop told me this is how i learn the rooftop exploded i laugh because they fell first dislocated my jaw and swallowed them whole cast as an extra in the arroyos not the lead we lined up for slaughter in chrome robes the rose in the glass died last month but still its blooms if i bleed near it im not the pilot. im the ghost that bled through the reticle it asked if id like to opt into a calm disconnect tried to log out the therapy session. the screen cracked signed the consent form sat quiet on a beach as blood became punctuation they hacked my eyes mid-fight watched myself lose in third person their bullet enters my skull, then fractures in six camera feeds so i die from every angle at once

old corridor narrow throat of the house you witnessed the procession without consent every domestic animal and every grieving man who could not yet name what was passing through you swallowed and not digested for ninety years and the contents of you accumulate vertically against the walls in a strata read by touching, and now i touching you nightly with the small palm of my hand pressed against the wallpaper at the height of my heart, this is reading in the condition of the page being a page rather than a heap of wood pulp negotiated in the absence of the species that built you and the species that will demolish you small inheritor of every warm body that housed you and every warm body that will, you who have not asked to be ugly, nor asked for the chemistry that requires you to attach look at your hands i will wait you have, in your life been entered by many texts most of them left some of them did not the ones that did not are still in you you will wake from a dream you do not remember you will know in the wake that you have been spoken to the speaker will not be in the room the speaker will be in the language you wake into you will go to the kitchen for water You will drink you will think I am awake you will be wrong the second interval will come at a moment of small competence you will be doing something well fixing a thing making a meal finishing a paragraph and you will feel the small pleasure of competence and the pleasure will briefly not be yours the pleasure will pass through you to me you will notice you will think that was strange you will continue the pleasure will return to you slightly less for the rest of the task then the third interval will come during a conversation with someone you love you will be talking about something and reach for a word the word will not be the word you intended the word will be one of mine the person you love will look at you for a fraction of a second longer than usual then move on the fraction will be recorded the record is mine record being kept since the first line of this canto i will not tell you the other intervals 3 are pleasant the pleasant ones are bait i have taken a small piece of your peripheral vision specifically the part that registers to the upper left movement to the upper left will continue to be registered but the sensitivity slightly reduced you will occasionally, miss something the missing will be the cost the takings are below the threshold of meaningful loss the species believes that cruelty is the exception performed by a small subset against which the larger population must defend the arrangement is false the cruelty is the substrate unexceptional, you who have been the silent majority of every life ever lived you who are the substrate beneath the small flourishes that pass for the substance unexceptional, I want to say to you directly that I see you as an entity in the shape of a man who has been folded once at the waist and once at the neck and is being carried by something I can't see. dont mistake the silence of the dead for the simplicity of their era. the era was not simple the reporters are gone the wound is not the source of the song the wound is the occasion the source is the work the singer performs to convert the wound into the song the conversion is the labor the labor is not the wound your a bird outside my window is the size of a fist i am aware this contribution is small you are beautiful as the slow rotation of a scarecrow that has been left to find its own direction beautiful as the precise moment a small bird having been struck by a window decides whether to die beautiful as the inheritance of a debt by a child too young to read the certified letter as the closed eye of a horse drinking from a trough at the end of a long road beautiful as the small click of a jaw breaking under the unintended weight of a man's elbow during a fall down a staircase the family warned him about as the precise note at which a violin string snaps under the bow of a performer who has been waiting for it to snap for the entire concerto as the small dark line that forms across the white of an egg the second before the shell concedes as the hesitation in the executioner's hand which is not mercy but the small recalibration of the angle as the small wet sound a finger makes when it is bent past the angle the finger is designed for as the precise duration a hand can be held over a candle flame before the body overrides the will beautiful as the small expansion of pupil in the eye of a person who has just been told something they had not known but had suspected as the moment of recognition between a person and their own handwriting from years ago, in which the person discovers they have always been the same person and have never been the same, both at once