Third-Coast

My Dear, I must confess. I never told you, but I got high once. And once before that. The first time was the day I met you. In that old bookstore we touched fingers among the fiction shelves reaching for a Joyce. An awkward moment made majestic when you laughed. I knew right then and there. This girl is outside my comfort zone. Then you took my hand. As you led me through the aisles, I ran my fingers across the books and prayed inwardly for osmosis to give me the right words to say. And we were off. We took turns riding the rolling ladder across the biography shelves. We encouraged an Asian boy in the self-help aisle.  We asked the clerk,

No quaint bottletop knick-knack wisdom scratching at thick cotton candy scent stuck to tongue and throat, she burns words for fuel and breathes through vessels she collected on the way because it keeps her alive.

liken my highlights to sea depths. never learned to see red but plenty's left to seize yet. arrogant and brief, kept the universe bottled in my throat. sweet release—death—throttling a supernova. elect to redress old gashes with cuneiform rejected. bleed out in stress redirected. the torn up writs in rote shackles, pagination of the infinite sketchily thrown together in the shade of the rectory. lathing, you expertly haggle my floating sheol from rich myth to ragged fable. shekel me not, for my tesselations stagger the bold, congeal the thones of the past into intersecting eras. this, the wrinkled stare of the ne'er to be mastere

| earth arpeggiated & splitting | plays an evergreen accompaniment in the spring | as vivaldi shivers floral tempi | echoes cascading of ostinato | muttering, six feet tritones below polyphony frenetic | seasonal dirt packed soundless | richter shudders eardrum scaling | complexities at ground level{ed} | & leaning pizzicato towers crashing further | down. |

faux-holy hands hovering over cold fawns font of roles reversed and roving claws goaded dawn folded into ochre verses, potent and polished your pauvre odes raw in my lovering abolished all polarizing flaws for the float of god toting the sands of traversed solar systems in odd portals we yawn at those worse off wars in squallish jaunt pursuing oped shutters and all i want is one option that doesn't know me

i am not built in the way of a house nailed together, layered on a definite frame- no, more enigmatic in structure pooling in the shallows of negative space my crystalline shoulders and heart heavy; human. no habits i can lightly break like cigarettes or coffee, instead falling as a constant into love and other margins where man shouldn't go easily and i dwell beneath the stars i know i'll never reach.

 A vagrant, the egotist Held hostage At a homeless shelter Soul mate, contortionist Jagged fire Fight and flight Hustler an addiction Prescribed a living Dying to get in