and someday, after smelling the same cologne every morning for 20 years, will you feel stuck? will you want a way out but be unable to find one? or will that smell bring you comfort? will it give you your place in the world?

please let me know.

heard a car coming up the road
thought it was you,
coming to make it up to me
then remembered you couldn't drive

in my heart i am nighttime

hematite and rhinestone glittering in blackness

a string of tiny bulb lights over some dark alley

tiny, distant twinkles from cities or stars

in my soul i am something else

sunbleached, open, expanded to the horizon

black hills, salt flats, desert

deep breaths of pure oxygen

for 26 years
I've gathered information
built my brain
noticed everything

it's been my goal
to see
to understand
to absorb it all inside of me
until it is me

once you know jesus
you're ready
forgiven
you can die safely

but all that knowledge
all that building
becomes nothing
becomes vacant ether
the day jesus takes your soul
the day it's safe to die

black road plateau,
winding across the highlands
down through colorado
and eventually,
arizona or new mexico
I forget which

behind the trucks,
making slow time,
no time
ripening in the open sun
crawling down the road,
weeks at a time

a man said i'd find it there,
coasting across the dirt,
the moonlike plains of the desert
less gravity,
too much elevation,
a thinness in my blood

in a wide gorge,
the plants pricked me,
the bugs coated my eyes,
the lizards picked away at my skin
I went deeper until there was shade
and mud
and I stayed there a year

the first man I met
I gave my heart
since there was no one else around
and despite the sun, his skin was pale
and I thought he could use the blood
one day he turned to wax
and around three,
the hottest point in the afternoon,
he melted away

the second man to come along,
I gave my body
since I thought I would die anyway
his hair was long
and wound into the sides of the gorge
and one night while I slept,
I assume he blew away

the third man,
at this point a tedious phantom,
I gave my soul,
since I guessed I was dead by then
and what this man looked like
was burnt diamonds,
sooty and sparkling,
and one night there was a rain
and a sudden river carried me
to las cruces
and mocked me in my haste,
my lack of faith

if you knew me before
you'll know the ghost i've become
the lives I've consumed
the bodies I've buried

I crack apart,
too long in the heat and wild
borrowing time,
with none of my own left
wandering old roads,
barren fields,
looking for the meanest of the thieves i've known,
looking for my soul

fog in the roads

making driving harder than the rain

and some burnt candle smell

outside the windows

as if this were all a holiday facade

a miniature world on someone's mantle

lit by flame

i am drunk

in warmth and christmas carols

and my coat feels like something i should sleep in

and i wish i could be out with the people i love

in blinking lights and layers of frost

mist rises from the road

and water washes toward the car,

spraying the under-carriage as the tires spin

and there is a greened tint to the air

recycling bins zombies emerging from driveways

deep nights and deep feelings and i wish i could stay out and embrace them

instead of returning home

a defeated conqueror

lost in the fog of my own mind

lamenting the distance of once-a-year weather

likely already gone

traded for skirts and plunging necklines

and someday i will feel the fog rising from my grave

and lament the days lost to life

and the blindness of spirit

and i will search for those i've lost

and i fear that i will only find them on nights like this

once-a-year nights

back when i spent hours with rocks and caterpillars and ideas

there were such things as secrets

things too big to share

things which had lives of their own

stored up in my chest

monsters that i didn't know how to release

without them tearing me up on their violent escape

and these were not things told to friends

because friendship was so fragile and fickle and tenuous

and could so easily dissolve,

and because i wasn't these secrets

and i didn't deserve to be associated with them,

further weight against my forming personality

and i still keep secrets

because that is the thing to do

when something is so horrible that its escape

would maul those in its path

would massacre or mangle all souls within range

but no one else keeps my secrets

they spill out in a torrent

and people talk

and soon everyone knows

and my childhood instincts were correct

that someone cannot know a fact relating to you

without attributing it to you as a person

and i always knew not to let anyone too close

not to give anyone too much

but a sting of indiscretions

during a long-abandoned attempt to connect

plagues me still

and i wish i could go back to those days

when those monsters only lived inside me

and were not me