The Wreck Of The Earth

the wreck of the earth

humans are in the same category
as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.

we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.

i am no exception.

and this is how we wreck what we have learned to love: by trying to save it or loving it in the first place.

speaker for the dead

i will not write your obituary.

i will not grow flowers from the mouth of someone who refused to look for what was beautiful, i will not make that beautiful.

there is no surrender, no good fight, believe me when i say that i have spoken for the dead and they say:

nothing, when you die i will say nothing because that is what is waiting, i will not write you an obituary because you will be dead. and i, the one speaking, would be putting words into the air about you, without you, and no defences against them because i will be angry. if you choose that-

i will not be a speaker for the dead to let you live in a memory.

i will hold you through this unbearable life and do what i can to make it bearable. i will not be angry if you ask me if you just ask me for anything other than an obituary. you can call me if you are lonely.

and if the world becomes too much to bear, you are not Atlas. let it fall from your shaking shoulders. and i will write the way the world ends, i will write you the way it feels to be free i will write you in another life a thousand alternate times in which you are you but not and still you this crippled fool, a light opera and i will write you anything if only you are alive to hear it.

and i ask the same of you; in the case that my mouth becomes a birthing ground for the bodies of small violence, roots to wind their way around my tongue and teeth for the trees to swallow me swallowing the empty earth whole, come no mourners and no words. let the decay speak for itself.

do not talk at my funeral. do not read these words at all.

stubborn hope

the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.

we are born, and the war begins.

the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:

we are alive, and we fight on.

reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?

we die. and this is what is left:

stubborn humanity. forgetting, again and again, and thinking we can rise from this past in a different manner than before. to come from anything other than pain and leave more than just our fragile bodies, a lovely imitation of how we fell into this by giving the trembling want of life our startling consensus: if we were given more than what we asked for, cleaving a hole inside something already hollow, we think we may have been something beautiful. we think that thing that we could’ve held inside our empty hands the whole time could have been named hope.

bitter kisses

i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.

does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?

another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.

suck on the pulp and kiss everyone good bye. i leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. i leave a bitter sweetness on their tongue.

uranus has a bad reputation

that they don’t deserve. uranus knows all the whores & fuqbois & faggots. they don’t always deserve it either. there’s a club for people like them: the membership list is written on the insides of bathroom stalls, sent in group texts, gossiped about behind a hand over a mouth familiar with the lips of someone who was in it. uranus doesn’t know why people make jokes & laugh at their expense. everybody’s talking but nobody’s telling them. (doesn’t mean they don’t hear it.) uranus knows all the secrets about drinking till you forget & having sex like it doesn’t matter & the drugs to make you feel better than high. that’s the bad part. all anyone ever says is about how to save someone from themselves. no one ever talks about what happens when they don’t need to be saved. how you can be okay & not be what’s expected. how the “whores” & “fuqbois” & “faggots” grow up to be alright. how they grow past what people think & knowing what you can do is better than not having tried at all. but it is never once easy. nobody ever notices the scars on those whores’ wrists because they’re too busy with the body. nobody looks past the face to see the mind inside. and god forbid they see the love and not the sex that everything is objectified to mean. but if they want it: own it. give them the anarchy, give them the sex, take the reputation that precedes you and walk into the room, two fingers up to yesterday saying fuck the whole universe. tear it down to make your own.

That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.