Withdrawn Jupiter

I complicatedly want you to know,

Brother mayhem,

That tonight I wanted

To fuck you

As if God had given me

A gift

Which he would now judge me on.

I intended to score

A perfect 10.

But your pretenses were un-vacant.

Your mouth belonged to a sister.

Our paths were,

Inevitably,

Beginning to part.

The Tightrope Walker

Was it her intention?

Did she mean to end

So many laughs

When she bit that tightrope

Clean, in-half,

And reached to hug forty-seven stories

Before she fully embraced Earth?

The woman,

This town starlet,

Had finally failed.

On the inverted flight

Into the traffic skyline

Sons seem pigeons.

The mayor's speech

Is a bald-eagle's squawk.

The city tenants point impolitely,

Not having time to think

Of their manners.

In the next two weeks,

Before the tightrope walker's name

Is banished to crisp and tan

On newspaper headlines

In the backs of closets,

Children asked their mothers

Why the woman fell.

Mothers asked each other

The same.

Fathers started drinking

As they maneuvered the fine strings

Holding their families together.

It seemed as if the town

Was makeshift bound

By the rope;

Pulling these skyscrapers together.

Now, the sky seems to be

Crashing downward.

On the trip down

She rips her leotard

Clean off.

It will later be sewn

By a mother

To remember her daughter's beauty

Now seamed.

Welcome

Trust in me

Broken comb part my hair

And

Breathe deep the memories

That have hardwired themselves to my cheeks

Now ebing and flowing with the sounds

Of those gaudy mechanical things

Called lungs

That live to let your heart do its job

Twine your spine around itself

And get a better view of this moment

Where all the poems about

Trust and the love we want ourselves to feel

Is being played out

As we skip the sixty broken hearted promises

That eleven minutes after eleven

Offers people who cling to hope

Like transients

We do not need these wishes anymore

We found that trust in this night

This is not sex

Binocular piping baristas

Fresh off the shift

Turned voyeur might call this sex

But this is not sex

This is not making love

As much as it is

Creating it

Hard-boiling lust and straining it clean

This is the night

Where we turned off all the clumsy switches

Of the world

The labels and the terms

Opened every door

And shouted that tonight had happened

In a language that only people who had learned

What we have now learned

Now know

Both translators of this language

Now find themselves smiling

One mouth too dry

And full of pillow to speak

The other too wet and understanding

Trust in me

Like I was someone you had stood

Shoulder-to-shoulder with

And had entire conversations

Finding eye-contact in the horizon

Like someone who had skipped a date

And the chance for sex

To sit shoulder to shoulder with you

Watching a movie with too much blood

And too little plotline

Like someone who listened

Face to face when you said the things

Girls were too much themselves to understand

And boys were too much themselves to care for

And mined a new type of love in that

Trust in me

Like I know you

Like I was your brother

Like I am

Like I could watch you sigh

And not wonder about the breath parting your lips

As everyone else in your position would

Trust in me

Even from the beach of your tomorrow

Trust me

So I don’t trust alone

Once More

He tried to tell me

That leaving the light on

Would mark a mistake.

I asked myself

If the mistake I made

Would haunt me.

Yes.

Sometimes

Sometimes

Sometimes the love

We stupidly choose to feel

Is grotesque.

This way,

We do not feel the brokenness

Of avoidance:

A self-sheltering.

This is how we remember

Not to forget.

This is how we remember

We can feel.

Harder in the presence

It feels more broken

For having felt your fixing.

In a mixed up way

The bruise is a reminder.

You were always so good at that;

Breaking things

In the process of mending them.

In losing and not minding.

Help me remember

How to remind you.

Nighttime is both

Beautiful

And treacherously hind-legged.

A dystopia we wish for

On the backs of tossed coins.

The coming year will be.

A waiting mortuary.

And then it will multiply.