BY THE WAY

miss having you walk my body like the space 

between two places. 

miss having you shelter in the navel in the dented nipple 

you runaway baby Uriel  

oh, miss watching you pee with the door open 

and miss you whining when I don’t do the 

same and miss even more the sound of you 

thumping up the stairs before you ring my bell.  miss

being orange in blue and miss being drunk on beer at 

noon oh miss miss miss us eating chicken salad at 4am  

miss the mustard on the corner of your mouth and  miss it 

on my very, very white shirt. 

miss you making me cry because I wore water based mascara  

and miss you telling me no teeth baby no teeth and miss 

nodding, eyes pooled, oh miss doing nothing with you miss 

breathing next to you miss life pointing outward  miss having 

so much time to kill we think it love.

SEX WITH AN OPTIMIST 

Is mostly giving away intent, 

mostly cartilage. fresh beaded dirt,  

fresh brain matter down the cervix - 

sweat, like keeping on only the jewelry 

mostly an imitation of the hour, your eyes  

shut with an unprecedented disbelief and I 

suddenly on a pulpit / raised butt-naked  

like a crisp sword grass. 

both of us lose something to the other 

and so lose nothing, 

I work the mouth like a fifth limb just to 

see you in pain, recoiled in place as if 

drawn on paper; you work the tongue and  

invent current out of my newly ticklish neck 

and lose your planetarian god to me  

this way 

and considering I don't believe in anything at all, I 

am for the first time envious of the people who do,  

this is what I lose. when skin points to skin before  

we even notice, what is a billion years, what is first? 

in front of the mirror, we stand with a single shadow. 

I look at myself from your beautiful hungry eyes,  

and I think, perhaps hunger might just make it, even 

when we cannot.

BLUEBIRD

even the asphalt is amnesiac when I 

leave your place before the thought 

of leaving arrives. outside your 

apartment's window, the sky bright 

like a light bulb, our Sunday 

morning already splitting into some 

other aspect of itself. here you’re 

running late for a postponed work 

and the cab has already called me 

two times. Here we've got to let each 

other live though where in the 

kitchen I watch you spread an extra 

layer of butter on the toast you made 

for me, so unfazed by time, is a 

gravitational standstill I could easily 

want for a punishment — this, and

the fifteen seconds we take to kiss by

the elevator, a taste always still 

swelling  on the tongue.  

In the cab I think about last night 

and the night before that, the part 

where the room was briefly lit only

by the faraway streetlights, our faces apparent 

like two neighboring moons. You are so, so hot 

I gave up on question marks  entirely, to say: 

nearer, nearer, nearer please!!! Then– the 

sound of us existing on 

top of everything, time spent 

on looking with our fingers a slippery 

slope into yet more time. 

Like seeing a bluebird in flight burnt into 

an empty canvas and sure, soon I would 

be able to imagine it perched at last, but 

not tonight.