I will feed myself to you
because it is all I know how to provide
and I must keep you alive
even when you don’t need me to
especially then
When there is nothing left of me
I will languish over starfish privilege
begging you not to leave
the nothing I have left of myself
When you hear my death was a hoax
who will you pin it on?
Will you be relieved to see me alive
or disgusted that I would’ve tried such a thing?
Will you see in me a walking corpse
still as dead as you had heard
reanimated by some unholy spectre
or abberated beyond recognition by a stint in hell
returning only to spread the sin that took me?
Will you plead to god in sobbing fits
begging her to return me to the abyss
from which I must’ve risen
or will you thank her for returning me to you
safe
if a bit different than you recall?
Will you rejoice in my resurrection
celebrating a future you had thought gone?
Will you bless me with your assurance
that the rumors always seemed false to you
and that the suicide note didn’t look like my handwriting anyway?
Either way, the curtain will fall from the blurred edges of your vision
There will be no suicide note
There will be no false death on my part
There will only be a grand reveal
A final bow on one performance
to begin another
The people on the stage don’t really die
but it feels that way
because our minds make it so
You wrote my suicide note
Used it to explain what you think I ought to have
and signed it how you think I might’ve done
but I wasn’t faking anything
nor was I dying
I was just done with a character
We spend the first half of the trip
arguing over what we should listen to
finally deciding on
the same things we listen to every time
and then we talk over it
Pay it no mind until that line comes
and we gotta sing for a second
or that little fill happens
and I gush like it’s the first time I’m hearing it
We drive pastward to visit what bore us
half-listening to songs
so familiar we could live them by accident
and it all still feels new
after so long
with you
And the exits fly south
as we sink deeper into the mountains
Real mountains,
not the columns of concrete and rebar
we crane our necks around at home
Trees finally begin to outnumber us
Free-range trees,
not penned into reservations on the sidewalk
cruel mercies reminding us what belong there
And our debate rages on:
Am I from here?
Depends on whether or not it’s convenient
(if it is, I’m not)
And the deer feel me approaching
ready to chase me off the road
and the bridges bow briefly to threaten collapse
on our passage alone
and I know it’s me they’re trying to drown
The rivers rise to accommodate
another body to set adrift
Even if I was ever from here
this place holds no sentiment for me now
I am a traitorous organ
keeping the wrong body alive
and that’s fine
I’m just visiting
We are on display
pinned in circles
by the Great and Terrible Scientist
who decides where we go
and who we go by
using alien metrics
we are never taught
In our case
impaled and wrung of almost everything
it is up to us
to muster our life in reserve
to reach out to each other one last time
hold hands in incantation
that science can never understand
because it is not science
When our hex takes hold
and The Labcoat High Priest suffers our final misfortune
we will be long dead
There will be no more pins added to our display
I am fortified
to stave off the most barbarous onslaught
four windowless walls
each six feet of solid stone
eight yards high
with ten-inch steel doors
a dozen cannons armed in all directions
ready to cave in the sun
and make islands of landlocked fields
You have clambered over heaps of would-be invaders
Their bodies armed to teeth I blew from their skulls at fifty yards
now sitting another fifty yards away from their posts
like seeds begging to be taken into untilled soil
You have come unarmed
without even a white flag
calm enough to be a rabbit
too lean to waste time chasing
or to waste a bullet hunting
Amidst the crow-picked carcasses
Before the guns built to kill and called defense
Upon the grass brown with ever-drying gore
you do what nations couldn’t
You knock
and the door swings open
The creature we have let into our home
tells us it hunts what will come for us in the night
Each of us too small to speak against it
so we thank it
even if we know what comes in the night
is often so much larger than what’s before us
The first few nights
it postures
laying dead things at our feet
so full of pride
“It could’ve gotten any of you,”
it boasts
of the rabbit
or the pigeon
or the mangled form so much like ours
and it keeps itself fed
Some will take it at its word
“What could’ve happened without it?”
as if something was always happening before it
And they will call it a friend
Others will know better
Some night
not long enough after our unsummoned guardian occupied our door
the ground quivers
beneath steps like war
and all at once
the innocent wildlife that never truly threatened our home
disappear
Our creature is left so hungry
It will cry as it eats you
but it will eat you
When I am done dismantling the house I have built us
each brick and board a suffering to endure
I will take what is left
to build a monument to you
that I will defend
with all of the violence
of an untamable beast
with all the fervor
I should’ve used
to keep you feeling safe
in the house
This place is full of such memorials
I still haven’t figured out how to keep a roof above my head
but I am very good at protecting what’s left
In exile
I set minor errors like bait
as I talk to what life is left around
Shrubs and lizards protesting the sand’s barren facade
in their small way
I will the almost-truths to sound towards the horizon
to chisel at your ears
and draw you into the desert
to correct them
You can’t let the holes go unfilled
or leave the details unexamined
even when you know why they’re there
This is how I stay in your life
A correction to be made
Burning a prayer candle
at both ends
keeps twice as many thoughts in touch with god
for half as long
but more than that
it’s twice the fire hazard
with no way to catch the falling wax
and eventually
the prayers catch up to each other
to fight for god’s ear
only to finish themselves incomplete
and at odds with even their creator
burning hands in the crossfire
How such unrelated words
contradict in collision
splinter to make so many new reasons
to light another
I breathe in tremors
lungfuls of rabbits
restless with fear’s lust
pounding arrhythmic
against my loose dirt diaphragm
Your eyes
drive them frantic
set their teeth to gnash
at the tense muscle
crushing them
without my consent
They’re trying to reach you
You shudder beneath the sunlight gaze
I cast over you
to bring warmth,
to give life,
to make known the beauty that is you
You thank me for the warmth,
the life and light by which you work
but you say you feel exposed,
stark and fleshy
with no way out
You fear my light acts fast
to sear, red and peeling,
each stretch of skin it falls upon,
to bring about cancer
as it digs into any pore it can catch
“I know it’s not your intention,”
you promise
through tired hostage grin,
and I try not to believe
I am killing you
When I see you
blood pools behind my cheeks
inviting you to swim
I am Pavlov’s dog
or an anglerfish
You come closer
and the pools grow deeper
as if they heard you say
you love to drown in me
Upon contact
pools splash
I am
Jackson Pollock as crime scene analyst
You are
drinking what you can
We pull away
and I see you
with a lost-at-sea look
treading scarlet
as I leak
and you drink more than you should
I don’t stop you
I will take it back so soon
when it is my turn
to dive
Low harbor fog is turpentine between sea and sky
I am staring at where the horizon is supposed to be, I think
watching both sides play coy under the covers
until my vision blurs
as the grey gives up
collapsing into either/or
and the distance
unable to hide any longer
shows itself to be real
and closer than anyone could’ve predicted
“There is a world beyond this,”
I sigh,
never having doubted
for more than too long,
and I lean into the water
not sure if I’ll swim
When an unfamiliar face showed up at the annual ecosystem conference
we all heard it out.
This was not the first time we’d seen an unfamiliar face
presenting new ideas and concerns.
In the past
these had been simple requests
from species looking to fill their role
as best they can
but this was different.
They claimed to be crucial to ecological development,
cajoled countless well-meaning links in the food chain
and won over so many
with pushes for equality
without consideration of need
or of resources at hand.
Most of us are dead now.
Those that remain
are surrounded by the usurpers
taking all that we had sought to keep in equilibrium
“From each according to ability,
to each according to their need,”
and claiming theirs were the neediest needs,
Claiming to be integral to our society
even though we had existed thousands of years before their advent,
turning soon to cannibalism
to sustain their insatiable hunger.
An ouroboros
ever constricting
around our necks.