stories from the Realm

If Things Fall Apart

If things fall apart,
please know that
I have given you everything I had to give.
There is no recess
hidden in my soul; no
spark of light that you are missing.
Every piece of myself that I once owned
I sent to you.

Lay them out across the floor,
small, shimmering fragments of sole,
and you may find
they lack charm, even when put together.
But if held up like
a mirror to your eyes,
they glimmer.

In time, you will come to see
that I lack the words to
make things right.
Even sorcerers can’t divine
the future, the nature of Love,
so hard as they try.

But if you stare closely, you
might
see

me.

Love feels like

having your whole chest ripped open and sewn back up,
without any anesthesia.
It feels like
choking on your own blood.
It feels like
a tracer round,
a bullet to the head,
or sticking your tongue in a meat grinder and
pushing “on.”

And yes,
it is beautiful,
and yes,
it is exquisite, but it is exquisite
pain
(or carnage, perhaps, if you’re bellicose).

Those old poets, those saps who
write about love like it’s some cosmic force? They don’t know shit. They think
love is Tradition, or Commitment, or (worst of all)
Romance.

They wouldn’t know love if it
tore out their brains
and used them for fertilizer.

But I know, because every day
the gaping hole in my chest where my heart
used to be
grows and grows,
like a child in the womb.

The Taste of Electric

Electric on a nine-volt battery:
the lifeblood of my strings.
Put the sockets to your lips and
breathe out.

Every day without you is like
this
shock.
The zap of each connection
small and instant;
The taste of electric numbing my tongue.
So

can

you

feel…?

the chemical burn in
the back of my throat;

my alkaline lover

burns me to my core.

Singing in the Rain

The sky rains a symphony;
a gentle, wet flood of music
for me to sing and dance in.
(If this was your skin,
I think you’d find it easy,
too.)
Then the sun comes up,
bringing hot mist, and shadows,
and silence.

This City

I wish I could explain
how
this city makes me feel like home
in a way that you would understand.
As I walk through the park,
the sound of jazz wafts through the air,
tinged with the smell of cannabis.

I feel whole.

Maybe everything is changing;
I don’t know
if this effervescent effluent of emotion will
make my heart beat true again or make me
explode
from the inside out.
Then I could cover the city sidewalk with
what’s left of me, the
gory, glistening entrails of
new birth.

Can you find yourself in a place?
It seems so paradoxical, that
a thing concrete
can point a person toward an essence
or a state of mind.

Did I lose myself?
Or is the sound that I hear echoing in my ears
just another indicator that I am,
as I feared,
truly alive?