the universe was an accident

I have lived
these afternoons
of afternoons

where daylight
was heightened by day
and days came
arrested and past

unplanned

it isn’t like I planned it
naked on my side
and away from you

I give you the self 
that I can’t see

God,
if all that’s romance were
how easy it would be!

***

face-down on the bed
like just another 
of your girls

No one can have 
a body or a baby

you can only raise it
raise it right up

heaven heard
through a wavering
branches of leaves

***

in your bare room
I say listen
to the melody in your mind
to what you always knew

when what I meant was
I want us to run together
free

where what is between us
is given to be a given

on spring-softened
sun-drenched sheets

unnamed love in current abundance
as if the most natural thing
profound in the silence

I broke 
love’s name 

but I wouldn't fasten 
a repeated falseness to you

I wouldn’t glance
at a distance gliding past
a hundred parallel trees 
interchangeable from a vehicle
in thirty thousand
imagined eternities

***

the way light falls across
a vacant floorboard
I feel your presence
constantly highlighted
by absence

as if thin wings
were to be caught
as if I’d want 
you anything other
than unpinned
forever summered

I don’t use metaphor 
to compare my love
to anything but
what’s in the air
the same of which
we can finally breathe 

so here I am
naked like anyone
in all the disquiet
of a human body

***

love does tend 
to be faded
but I guess
I heard it like
fated

***

I say listen
don’t say it back
until the weather
has cleared 

but if love is always
making a bed for a stranger

here’s is unmade
and I’m undone
light and disheveled 
in my dumb utterances

if you fear money
you make money

your God

and if I fear love
exhausting my satiety
well, I’ve decided to feel
enraptured by my fear

violent like this
liberated by this

like how you said
it happens naturally
in violence’s aim for beauty

zero to oblivion

as if pulled by gravity
I gasp, I suck
and breathe

like any animal 
gracefully

spitting in hand
hand in face

it was my mistake

thinking I had my own body
thinking I had my own name

this was supposed to be easy

claiming to be free
then coming around
with this want
and this need

like god
like someone
help me

who is the maker of their own good
who is the maker of their own evil
who is the maker of their own 

anything

somewhere a seagull cries
it’s mournful!
it is mournful to think of it

how any animal 
tends toward comfort
making a bed
in a nest of leaves

come to me
come here
come for me
this was 
supposed to be

sleep in nearness 

this year I’m sick of thinking

in all the structures of my dreams
in the largest New York City of my mind
I don’t have an answer for anything

so what I bare my ass
weather myself like a milkmaid
as if to recall butter softening 
in atmosphere of accelerated intimacy

under quarantine
isn’t the path that would unfold
naturally you’re my enemy 

by collision of air and butter 
apply pressure 
pregnant with pure expenditure 
each instant lolled in non-fixity

I am here to drink
in entirety

every time I fall in love
eat shit lose weight
so what the moon 
waxes it wanes

I write in your bed 
I’m you now--
consuming the other’s likeness
as if glimpsing one’s own visage
who can measure 
in such proximity

I’m dumb against it
everything beautiful in its falsity 

you say you hate the word want
I say what
in root of all suffering
stop being a narc, you ask Siri

outside neglected foliage 
ripples in possibility

the passion of your revulsion is funny
call out emergency!
ever uncertain of my certainty

but even if the gods said so
I couldn’t leave

ashamed of my nude elaborate theme

It’s spring in Mississippi
It’s spring in New York City

open up cry out
a faucet left to run
to the bottom