500 blue skies

this is my 500th letter to you. i've been gnawing at this for days, unable, and of course i would have to start at where i began: you, filling my skies with light; him, my love made leonine and crumpled. and though i knew i could not continue, we are both here. and though you were ragged, you are the cup of life. but i have changed, you have changed, so much has. could i recount it for you? but you were there. we unfurled, more than words can check.

i know i've seen my friends carried high on love.

i have seen winters end.

i have seen days licked as stamps and kept in rare.

i have filled my lungs with foam.

i have felt the ten seconds before sunrise.

i have loved with all my life.

i have said goodbye.

i have broken down as the tempest.

i have lost larger limbs than myself.

i have been renewed.

i have found you.

almost.

thoughts of wallpaper/love

i'll give you a summer grass and icy lips and mothdust hands. i'll give you a nothing smile and breathy promise and warm bed. i'll give you an ocean room and blurry love and pressed teeth. i'll give you a tender coat and painted locks and hot dreams. i'll give you a soft drink and hand claps and autumn skin. i'll give you a patchwork whisper and loose change and childhood glances. i'll give you an old song and clumsy sunset and comfortable bruise.

passenger II

you know those moments where everything you see and hear and feel is unbelievably otherworldly? bones recast by pure happiness? breathing in life that crackles and ignites? this is that moment.

every shivering song falls perfect, every raindrop spat in my eye is worth this.

passenger I

everyone in this carriage is so grey.

I am staring into signal lights with a thumping smile, trying to remember every daub of the sky.

without sound

you hold my hand and i cannot know the faulty wiring of my sea bird.

you keep holding for some scar of an ocean.

you keep holding the tide in.

you keep holding.

shaking light

THIS IS THE NIGHT THAT
TAKES FROM YOU
THIS IS—
ITS VIOLENT SKIN
BUT YOU
NEED TO MOVE TO
CAST THE
NEW SHADOW FROM
THE
LOCKED ROOM

your toothy wings revel

loneliness is always trying to raze you down and the night is so careless with its weight and you are thinking of book pages to wear and writing down heat signatures.

fidget strong, you uncertain force of birds, you acid zeroes, you blushed travelkind:

keep your head up, keep your heart strong
ben howard - keep your head up

animal fortress child keeps

i am alien: too fast, too slow. my breath radiates, my head to swamp. is it best to float and touch nothing? the silence or violence? or the pluck from your ribs that once held far? now i find you in my bloodbath, stony love. now i find nothing.

this bruise hangs round a spider's web, dripping cruel ghosts into shuttering gills, mouth wide with the miles, running away from the robots in his head (there is voice but requires a way to cup it in these hands.)

i cannot show you the miles of invisible ink all prickling around my dead crown, and yet this orbit has such intent—if i defy stars then all metal-flight, horrors chains!—but i can show you joy.

i am a shivering planet before happiness. i am the name of the moon of all my friends that come.

(i am crippled by some strange dictionary that licks my blood, but there is no light to dwell there, and so.)

(but though it is still not an easy thing, to try to show the imprint of love: its bones, its rags.)

all i can try to tell you is that while i have retreated from months (it's...somewhere in my pocket...some breath) i press my face to the glass and there is still a shimmering hope for you. and i cannot hardly think of how cold a wooden stair is.

i will be so much older

the universe plays to catch your question with its own catechism and sometimes there is something pretty in that.

away

i am sorry. i know how silence plays at your sweat, the exacerbation of fears. did i leave to look for you? did i find only smoke? did i lose something, there, and i just remain small? yet it can all be so peaceful, your breath strums acoustic, fingertips too much to fasten this skin.

i find no love, dear. i fuck those who are not you. these bodies that trick fuses.

i want so badly to find you in these fits of nights.