You are Dante's Fireplace

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)

honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)

never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)

All booze is just a sleeping pill now,
I close my eyes. Love.
You taste like someone waving.

I try and drink away the thing in my brain
that makes me wish these lines
are really what I feel.

Sometimes living is a swiss bliss
and sometimes it’s a rot popsicle.
The difference between bad living and bad loving
is a slipped keystroke.

Let me be the first to say
that I know the name for everything
and if I don’t I’ll make them up:
dukkha, naufragio, talinhaga.
Just like the young
whose hearts give no shame,
I love the excesses of beauty,
there is never enough sunlight
in the world I will live in,
never enough room for love.

I fear none of us will last long enough
to prove what I’ve always suspected,
that the sky is a membrane
in an angel’s skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.

I am afraid for the child skipping rope
on the corner of my street,
the girl on the train with flowers in her hair,
the man whose memory is entirely
in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness
when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep
I will grow old and forget how desire
once drove me mad with wakefulness.

Just like the perfect seasons
they will die
and I will die
and you will die also;
no one knows who will go first,
and this is the source
of all my grief.

men
want to fix you
save you
or fuck you

I can’t be fixed
and I don’t care to be saved

This is the history of water; how it
drips across skin — faucets, floods, never forgetting
thousands of touches in a meniscus.

There is death and there is birth; how we
swam naked with our bodies sixty percent lake water, the small
islands of our skin surfacing, barely touching.

We’re standing bone-naked in the skeleton of our
shower, history pooling around my ankles:
our skin like oil in all this — all of this,

holding ourselves together by the wetness;
the dewdrops of foliage on our minds — our

mouths collecting sin and hope, faith and
rare miracles, four hundred wars cleaning the
dark hoops of my eyes.

Washing ourselves clean with
the dark bones of secrets, of loss, of famine and
fall and friends who became lovers by accident.

Water, repeating itself — as lather
rinse and repeat, magnolia perfumed bubbles collecting
like salt dunes, our feet pressing into the sand,
the tides cleaning but never
forgetting.

At 7:35 A.M, you lay your tired body on mine
before peeling off, like a slow band-aid.

At 8:40 you sprint home and make instant coffee.

At 9:45 we finally drink it, cold.
I finish your leftover half.

By 10:50 you are already breathless.
I live for every time we overlap.

When 11:55 comes I spend the entire minute convincing you to stay.
You never do.

By noon I put my hands on your shoulders and say, “Baby,
you’re getting thin. All this running in circles and barely sitting down to eat.”

At 1:05 you tell me that while you were gone,
15,300 babies were born.

At 2:10 you don’t say a word,
just come in and kiss me for sixty seconds straight.

At 3:15 we sit quiet, listening to rain falling everywhere
in the world at once: all 15,000 tons.

At 4:20 we pull a little from the tight joint I keep behind your ear.
You do not inhale.

At 5:25 you meet me for happy hour.
My neck already salted, a lime wedged in my teeth,
a shot of tequila sitting on the bar.

At 6:30 I hear the ticking.
I count your heartbeat like seconds between thunderclaps.

By 7:35 I can see you in the distance,
each second a tease until you drape over me.
We always love quick and you never let me hold you.
I dream of drinking you through a straw.

At 8:40 you watch my beard grow 0.00027 of an inch.

At 9:45 we do not speak.
Too many people have died since we last met.

At 10:50 we pray for a meteor,
at least a clumsy kid to spill sugar in our gears.

11:55 is my favorite.
We’re only apart for mere minutes.

But at midnight you’ll apologize sixty times
because it will always be like this.

At 1:04 AM I am already sleeping.
It’s exhausting loving someone
who is constantly running away.