Astigmatism

I can't come home anymore,

and I can't trust your willingness

to see me until I can at least remember your smile,

and pretend what you're wearing now is the same thing.

I so want to pretend;

I swear I've gotten better,

to the point that even my friends are recognizing

the floor is lava and I'm on the wrong side of the room,

but that's hardly enough

to make this place real again.

It's like everything is coated in mercury

and I'm afraid to touch anything,

afraid to die, slowly, from a heavy metal

replacing my insides

and reducing metabolic flows to stagnant pools

where electrons whirl like clouds of gnats

dogging me and occasionally dying in my eyes.

They're no longer unpredictable—

I could tell you their colors

and why the blue lights are always doubled

and you could know how sick we really are

just by looking:

mine a bright red and yours a pale yellow.

Silent Territory

Long drives just won't let me--
keep the music out of the backseat
and half-raised antennas can't hope to hold her stations
or any FM band we used to play for
on those trips to Fords in search of rare polycarbonate
and hand-written notes we'd talk.

About then I first knew you
and while friends held their breaths past cemeteries
l could never escape the smell
of your strawberry chapstick I imagined on my neck.

These nights I wish you were still my second observer
'cause when I blink the lights are bound to saunter differently
and what if they never came back?

Self Titled

We swapped stories

about how I wore a cast to my first birthday

and the history of the bite marks

on all of your first grade classmates.

You told me that by eight you already packed to leave twice,

bindle and a hand full of cheerios,

while I practiced my disguises

and steadied my aim with orange tipped guns.

(The small white pools of nitrate

would crack and darken as I trained not to blink.)

Together we would follow dirt roads to their ends

with six foot cattails and the meadowlands--

populated with tall leaning antennas

and the crooked birds' nests they housed.

You captured it all in the facsimile of instant chemical reactions,

somehow the horizon perfectly level

in every shot.

You would have made an excellent marksman

if the targets were all sun splayed leaves

or the abandoned city streets we jaywalked,

our trespasses declared and documented

according to the appropriate naming convention.

I can't help but think of these things

every time I catch your eye

and I realize

this generic drive cannot be stopped.