tissue museum
yeast rises under foil // conflict for consciousness
shower thoughts take up too much room
you could look a river in its throat and still read its lips
to taste loss in each barrel
a springhare’s burrow of gifts
be kind to stuffed animals please
a monk-moan of a koan
spineless developers never look at laid concrete
a field spills into purgatory
something else holds up the sunroom
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∞
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calling you from a storage unit full of lamp bases, i told you there was no shade here. i couldn’t see anything, but it was bright with potential.
there’s a pop up picture book of this moment flapping between a toddlers frenetic page flipping, just like the moment of us is constantly dying in the other moment of us dying in the other.
when we cleaned the spilt tapioca from the cat’s paws, i got some in my mouth and tasted our dancing on the kitchen tile.
we joked about a jammed up tape measure, stuck at 2 feet 2 inches, holding it up to our stomachs and waists to elicit laughs from phallic insinuations. we would hold it up to our friends while they held a paddle and through our tear-filled squints, they would shake their heads.
there’s a taxi that only turns toward clock hands, so if we leave at 2:16 at the minute hand, we can switch to the hour hand after ten and sixteen minutes for two minutes each and be at the novelty snow globe factory in 35 minutes. we can then design our own scene and i want our kitchen tile, the spilt tapioca, and the tape measure in there.
you reminded me of the brief manifesto of a moldy bread loaf and that doctrine still gives me serious pause. thank you for bringing that back to my memory.
there’s a pop up picture book for all the schools of thought and creative considerations we’ve debated and some toddler is giggling fanatically at our investigations. the toddler is not yet old enough to understand aesthetic of really long stuck tape measurers.
i’d like to visit the museum of used tissues if that’s ok. they’ve got the one from the time i fever-dreamed you were gone and i want to cry in front of it. I’ll buy you some tissue shaped flowers from the gift shop after, i promise.
what do you call an ice cube between freezing and melting? this question knocks me unconscious if the ice cube is half way up or down the glass.
we had a lovely time spying on the reactions of potential candidates as they sat on the lobby couch possessed by a demon that’s possessed by a cat. hell would speak their nightmares to life in latin-leaning english and then the security guard would resolve the screams of the dead by bringing over a vacuum that would cause the couch to hiss then return to normal.
after the story, you ran your finger up and down the CIA promotional (over)throw pillow and we got in the mood. there’s a connection between us that rivals not only the probability of shuffling a deck of cards identically, but having a deck shuffled the same by a cat knocking the cards to the floor when we weren’t paying attention.
let’s go tie one on now at the bar that sells alien liquor and time traveling diaries. we’ll make our own chronology by writing dates down on bar napkins from stories we liked in the order we preferred. right before we leave, i squeeze all the tapas together in one hand and take a bite. the cab driver is looking at me crazy as i flag it down with a bunch of napkins on my hand. As my hands dry, they fly out the cab window and make little sculptures on the city street. we forget to tell the driver to switch back to the hour hand and end up taking an hour long loop. there are several pop up picture book pages dedicated to this scene.
it’s almost time to make another novelty snow globe.
egregious little clock slips. i swear it was just 6 years ago. there’s a failure of both fire and plattered appreciation too. i take this temporality and preheat it to 450. the oven warms by crossing borders with rosy cheeks in split seconds. my head skips at its heaviest, the center of dancing melodic intervals. it gets fuzzier. loops and tickles itself in the feedback. sips on dreams through gauze. there’s so much to say that the roof of my mouth is sweating and i would very much like to spit. the trail of tears is minutes and centuries and presently away from here. space and time are ovens we bake our heads in and the dial configurations are unique to all of us.
i shower with some company policies and some loose expressions from my childhood and a meritocracy throwing up on the bath pillow and i reluctantly let them under the water. the loofah is a net of succoring axiology, or vampire’s garlic in this case. the visual depiction of tension, an imagined knot of hair caught on the curtain, untangles in the epistemology of steam and god’s snakes. there is a trickly of shampoo painting the porcelain and i keep stopping the loose expressions from licking the trail. they are lost with knew knowledge yet enamored with straight lines. the meritocracy tries to court the snakes, but apples fall furthest along slippery slopes. trust me, i had to put the soap there. it’s for the best.
you gave awakening a stern talking to behind the thin winter brush. it scrambled with the bird song, just stressed enough to make the branches creak as it fled to its center.
come spring, your steps will bring breath to the mud and the suds will shine effervescent with the tilted sun.
the garden in your jaw bone has been kept still. only the trellis wobbles with the vines weight, the stretches of budding.
while unseelie pinch your ankles, you tend to the ghost of a flower, lost in the pluckiness of its outline.
when offered to be the susurrus between a copse of trees, you firmly pierced the crepuscular rays and lit our home with light kebabs. you can bend them like goosenecks and you have a specific arrangement for when you put pencil to paper.
an old photocopier in the creekbed turns out linocuts of your legend.
as your gaze traces a path, the serpent perches and crevices swell with coiled vines, the reaping of touch and passion.
any blanched sky, with creeping silhouettes like thank you card fringes, is marbled with your aura. a frog eye squints and unframes the atmospheric veins.
some say the crusts of shadows pass a softened reverence. the holy crispness in your grace.
you could ruffle the feathers of any nightmare. pupils of polished shedua, of a timber study and its lignin rot and its labored experience and its underbelly gently pushed on by mush caps.
it’s guaranteed our home will be swallowed by the churning soil. the spirit of you spins faster than time.
creatures and their coats parade in the current of your curiosity, a cozy stroll. and they strut too. it’s a feast for all the lines in the world to come and devour. we wove a carpet for them out of the gifted silk from the shadow crusts.
the river takes note, takes a page, takes a lesson, takes a memory, takes it down, takes it out, takes it deep.
you could look a river in its throat and still read its lips.
a wolf of two coats offers one to you and begins to prepare tea. the steam conga lines through the wood. the wilds are yours and yours alone.
in a robin’s nest made of bookmarks, you are the page saved across tomes and the warmth held to make homes.
once, a self tugged on your skirt. she looked up at you dwarfed by concrete. you crouched down, and as you lowered, the walls melted before infinite forests. you held her glassy eyes with your misty ones and said, “there will always be a seed growing somewhere”
a cast iron wriggles into the fire. there is an itch to cozy against everything you make.
when you invited the ants in decorously, they offered to make you a pillow. they worked in the night as you tossed and turned to reform and swap warm grains for cool ones. these little bows of effort define the grace of your scraps.
a few walking sticks crossed paths and when you took their bridge, they stopped feeling rigid. they let loose enough so you could walk on the water’s surface.
there are wings being blown off like dandelion florets, and the angels crater into the ground around you, forming a field of puddles.
all evening skies are lightened by the promise of morning sun falling on your smile.
end. the hum and surges of earth forever pass at your heart and i am so grateful to share in our soft world’s regard.
no shotgun scares me. i have felt the heaviness of viscera in strands guarding the emptiness forced upon me. defeat has found fertility in my chest and plants here frequently. far more foreign are the beliefs in luck or talent. if there are cosmic and eugenic gifts, know that i openly scorn them. it’s my curiosity that nurtures the fruit of loss. i eat it like i have to and taste a ferrous bitterness around a hollow core. so what do i do? put up some tape and plastic wrap? insert little whispers to clean up the ravagings? make little trinkets out of tissue and puppeteer them for others? all this healing just for defeat to see me again and dig a double barrel in my ribcage.
only one springhare, the one tendered by Doase, could store memories in items. Doase tidied the burrow one morning and picked up a hair tie through which they witnessed themself say, “with one eye we’re curious and the second, over-confident, miss mouse.”
through the strip of ripped upholstery, Doase said, “both rest and unrest stir us, but i’ll be damned if i go stirless.”
on touching the bookmark, “some of the truest stories have never been, yet always will be for how they were told.”
the marble, “meritocracy and trade are machinations of the greedy. for every gift i give you, please know it is not about fairness, but the simple love of passing something special from one to another.”
the train ticket, “while much is unknown, fear cannot take what we know to be true.”
a list of tasks, “procrastination is only the thief of time if you don’t give some of your time as an offering.”
the fringe of a nightcap, “miss mouse, you’ve hardly touched your dinner! how will you possibly keep your heart burning?”
a foreign coin, “loyalty is just an acceptance of someone’s mistakes, as long as they try to fix their mistakes. i will not define love for you in the same breath because they are galaxies apart.”
blue sewing string, “power is in the possible. like how we can still see through all the tears. even in grief, we have the power to feel close to those we love.”
the shredded stuffing of a plush potato, “you chew through toys like consumption chews through our experiences, miss mouse.”
excess patches used as critter quilts, “that’s a lot of heat for such a little form, you must have all the conviction we’ve been missing.”
and deepest in the burrow, a shriveled cap to a chestnut, “can we be friends, miss mouse? i promise to give so much love to you, even if love is being sapped from the world at an alarming rate. your story and mine will become one and the same. and far in the future, with the tears through which i say goodbye, our love will have taught us everything we need to see beyond and everything we need to go forward.”
getting the cotton swab treatment for my fabric teeth friction. some silk condition, some linen labyrinth, some cotton trail weaving its way against the brain stem's red carpet. stitch by stitch, the towers make mockery of stone. higher ivory, steeper stains. what a twinkle, a dull pinch of light nudging our cornea. pull me by my mandibles and show me what i’ve done. a tall order jams my nose into the objection, the sinful tapestry of consequential existence, into the veneer of an eidetic grove loosely shaped against the universe’s underside and draped against a flat line of mercury. there are the reflections we do not see, there are the reflections that seem like we ought not to see. a town chatters and i ask to be their eruption, gossip geysers and whatnot. “that gangly horizon wants no smoke,” i say. a dozen school kids fall out into the mercury. the world is quilted by patches of a dozen school kids. at the gates, i bend my knees more than i need to bend them. i scratch a molar and pick out some fuzz, cheap teeth and cheek feud. the tongue is a crochet needle, a grappling gun for hung tension, a night that is descending on the grove’s eagerness. “look at his mouth, it’s so stunning,” they say. there are lots of sirens blaring and photographs snapping and the turtles of the grove end their thousand year streaks and my nose is pressed up against glass at the end of the red carpet and i’m told this is the beginning of the end by some white coats on the far side and i’ve never thought i was mercurial in any kind of cruel way, but yeah, two lines, spacetime, some scurry some cause, a little tail between my legs during timeout.
armpit sweat starts crinkling, so i reach for the blinds and notice a hairy beetle nesting. i consider jousting with toenails, but i am already reaching from under a reach. the waddle of unsheltered feet also crinkles, crunchy with thrusted narratives in ink-bleeding headlines. i go to stop them, but the papers have already eclipsed existence and nested with the narratives. i consider salvation or at least salvage, but i am already writing from within a story.
a great urge to meet my father, to accept his bloody teeth into my cupped hands and clutch them in a rising flood of ultrasound jelly.
there are pockets of sand in my sides, and a scorpion surfing the dunes of my hips.
a developer signs off on the golf course and tries to build it before the comet crashes because the fun already happened for him.
ever heard a tire skid so divine it stopped a candle in its tracks?
i’ve never screamed successfully. not when it mattered or when i wanted.
socks have their own kinda christmas tree, but we’re not allowed to see it so don’t ask.
every street has a tail bone and it’s purpose is not stability, but rather the viscous mockery of the stop sign.
ultrasound jelly is just a bit thicker than megasound jelly.
i had to give a presentation and a golf ball hit my side, so i took a minute to preserve the scorpion family and accommodate the apocalyptic golfer. one last mulligan pre-extinction.
the tire skid, the tailbone, the tragic set up of a noir detective story. spoiler, his father also smiles with bloody gums.
when trying to spell stop with socks, the same use of curvature in the ‘s’ and ‘o’ stymies the intention of the ‘t’ and ‘p’.
the beached toy paratrooper in my side has named the golf ball ‘wilson’, but this is a bad joke, so i hit my spleen and end his fun.
the scorpion preservation is so popular and it makes me happy but i don’t know if it does any real good or not. the developer tells me he really likes this idea.
a little doll mourns the toy paratrooper. they said he wanted to study physics and that he might have been bisexual.
the megasound jelly isn’t really made anymore, since the ultrasound jelly was so much better.
the tailbone in the street has run low on insults. it sips on leaked transmission fluid and gnaws on scratched rubber and wears heavy, sagging eyes made of potholes. it asks the stop sign what it means to have real teeth.
to the listener, the comet is only coming in the world with the developer. i don’t know what to tell you if you aren’t the listener.
i tried to give the presentation again. i thanked the toy paratrooper at the end and the audience accepted an unforgivable silence. a silence that escaped the ultrasound and its jelly. a quiet that frightened the stop sign and shuttered the scorpions and mired the desert and deafened the comet.
but no silence shuts up the developer. he will take anything real and build on it, while leaving the tailbones for their desperation. he has let go of all his father’s teeth.
shadows on the other side of fog play cards
their table wobbles when the napkins soak through
i can trade one tooth for a napkin
an angel at the table makes the trade
in the distance you can imagine anything on the other side
to have braces and bone beds
to kiss without memory from the cut of sleep
laying out after all the soap lather drains
please pluck my ribs for the caves to come to dinner
she’ll uncork the last of phrases, final straws
there’s a soup for anything
i stewed in the canyon sediment
the dust of limbs that i could never wear
let’s exercise about the slowest gain
falling leaves play forgotten games
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padded creaks of gratitude
eek around a shudder
make no mistake is never asked
just as wood is full of motion
staples can summon broken film
ringing off the old wine
smoke and steam climb vines
i twist them around my finger
it’s a proper flirt
and it cancels out the weak timing
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a choke out here is timeless
a tightness out here is inevitable
trust the pelican warnings
church bells come through the cracks all glitchy
it’s just a little too close to that one melody
some violins hum pretty, even for gritty textiles
some committed love, a compromise of tactless touch
i welcome the second chair
what a reverent interruption
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it brings the waves up against the stilts
tides in lumpy knots
knees gotta get all the way up
a crowd of tall sticks starting the turtle races
clacks every now and then, a dawn’s game
we are spectators in the sports box
even though the monstera weeps wetlessly
i wash away in the figure
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backlight tickles the ceiling for a moment
imagine chasing those all used up
and losing to stitched stratus
it’s a proper gamble
and it mingles with the dialectic
up and under, up and understood
let me lick the bottom of a magazine cut out
the second chair has sparked a thought treaty
wouldn’t it oblige?
of course
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it simmers over my throat through that one melody
with the lid still on
my pancreas please, sweetness is a sickness
diagnostic gnostics, gnomes, and nomenclature
fun in name, nature, or knowledge only
we pine the next that belongs and behinds
ain’t that the dark pit of nova
the dog ears all perk up and i lose my place
can’t we wait here until it betweens?
no, don’t cry miss monstera
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hovercraft get their own spectator tickets
they are watching a different turtle race
let them know my differences
the memory of a bee descending into the grass
large graphic prints raptured in the ocean
the two on top of each other
mud chants in the creaks of its oppressors
retired plastic army girl joins in
she fought in the war of letters
she still wakes with the sweat of reality and flesh
we first met over anhedonian tea
that’s how to fold into upholstery
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inner ear splinters for a staked sound
to hear the joints of doors pop
the forever occupied bathroom swaps guests
to stay is to know self-refuge
and to discover the soft knocking of please
to know the wordless conversation over wood
chairs argue against support beams
slumped, my tongue wages swollen wars
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when the seat empties, i draft a symphony
conducted by stilts
the glass cracks and the wood choir creaks in litany
communal desiderium
releases the levitation lacking commitment
what’s it take to take care
are we ready to release
is release a gift we can take
i remember old roles and their old loss
loss grows older as the roles are lost
coats for all, but not all coated
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a deep hug for the stuffed puppy and its cotton heart
cuts along the ankle get reopened by fibrous socks
not another step until the others stand and the same sit
we can’t risk tripping on carpet clumps
make no, make not
miss none, stakes not
release, this might be the place for it
refresh a hot cup and sink into its chances
they wilt off the top and form a fine film
there are fewer stilts and
the ocean floor is filling with frozen clocks
nova itch to pierce the sky’s quilt
please don’t, i have to hold an icy aura
and bring a chair into my core
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there’s a new figure waste
though if it held shape that fears of form
it’s own refuse would form of fear
and dissipation would lapse into timing
with the transparent tendril
plucking at the second hand
sitting in the second chair
sitting at an angle that pauses now
and then at attention
avian songs only can really touch memory
you’ve been warned against such molding
clay only consumes you when something is outside of you
keep the pressure in for reference
it’s better to touch a kiln and know the cool kiss of forgiveness
than to never have known what gives definition
isn’t it awful to mean it before we go
what if goodbyes could mean something else alone
i would prefer not to load my farewell
fire the kiln with me in the chamber
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the stuffed puppy stays dry and safe from fluidity
crippling backs lack salted ridges
dehydrated canyons to forever hold high
how i miss those sweet tourists
made a souvenir of my pancreas
heaven is a knot of key chains
steady among the wainscoting
fragments dizzy in their purpose
i look once more for an opening
and i blink once more to catch a glimpse of slowness win