A Meandering Note on Love and Its Many Humors, Described Clumsily Through Excessive Metaphor

And what of Love
The sickness brought on suddenly
by electrons looking for valence
Salt-producing Love
lives on a musical scale
that waltzes through, a reckless host
of prayers and patience

All Love is true, if only momentary
Half moments shared on lawns
and in beds and between blinks
Great gasps of breath demanding
shared company, a salty gathering
of weight and atomic properties
All love is also untrue

The fever of Love is a great flower
sweating pollen onto the floor
Vomit odors hook into memory,
a nauseous bliss
Love’s greed is bacterial
Symptoms producing symphonies
no one has the stomach for

And what of Love
Its faces change shape endlessly
at all moments
Electron clouds exchanging time
The unkind rhythm shifts mid-song
The fever spikes
Truth and untruth have the same pitch

A Cornerless Room

I ache my heart in a cornerless room
I don’t care who sees me
Why ruin the view with harsh right angles
The room is silent and cornerless and bright
It smells like the desert

Poets assume the audience
wants to understand
They ache universally

Watch me crawl around the room
moaning at the moon,
stanzas strewn and ignored
Don’t build corners to sit down in
Don’t ruin my desert with your walls

Poets ache their hearts
They assume everyone can feel
as much as they do

If you like the view, stay
in the room, Stay as long as you want
The poet has no walls
I am boundless, like all the sand
in the quiet, cornerless desert

43:05:30

The mysterious dead are dead
I cut you out of me
before learning your name
or how your voice sounded when laughing
Now you are the bloodied ghost
of broken love
Mass graves inside minds, lost to time
When will we be free from ourselves
Will those trashed souls ever be found

Whomever they were, they are lost now
You are lost, because I said so
Baking in the sun, wasted

I was not courageous enough
Those with courage
are cut open, to spill water
They burned them and threw them in dirt
And laughed at their own clever depravity
But when given the choice to cut or to sow
I do the very same
Mysteries stay unsolved, veins split open
with machetes and unkindness
Clues are vacuumed out, miscarried

I will never be free from myself
Actions are machetes, splitting open souls
and They will never be found

Leftover

I sleep with my head pointed South
Upside down and inconsistent

I cannot speak my wishes aloud
Don’t complain
I don’t get to hear them either

No, I don’t need any sunscreen, thanks
I’m just exploring the depths of the human soul
Sunburns don’t bother me

I stared at the sun once during an eclipse
Most people lie and cover it with fear
and crepe paper
My eyes were fine and the sun didn’t care

Silence and inaction are murderers
If you face South, you’ll spill less blood
Of course I'm being serious

I only intend to speak aloud
if you keep the words in a treasure box
with all your treasures mixed in
so we forget whose is whose
and eventually throw the whole thing away

To Inka

My comet,
something to follow, in orbit
You are the author of my patience
We sing gently to one another, at night
We were born at the same time
Your breath reconfigured me
The past ended when I shook,
when you shook free
Our orbit is fearless
I can hear your heart inside my ears
while looking at the Moon
I have always heard it
I sing gently only to you, at night

Fever Haiku

Boiled blood beneath skin
Most contents under pressure
Hot reset button