AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME I HAVE 635 FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK

i'm tired of
falling in & out
of love with people
every single night

there are only so many ways
to show what side of the lake you're on

I'D RATHER BE BEAUTIFUL THAN MALE

"The moon is trans.

From this moment forward, the moon is trans.

You don’t get to write about the moon anymore unless you respect that.

You don’t get to talk to the moon anymore unless you use her correct pronouns."

            - joshua jennifer espinoza

& when the big dumb moon fell into our bed
i was right in the middle of telling you
about how i would like to coach your favorite baseball team
& after she fell into our bed
the moon asked about phases
why hers were called phases
& how scary that word is
you told her the sky
changes colors
turning blue & purple
like the body
she understood
kind of
& i told her
she's not ready for everything
that's okay
we're all okay
your light hits all of us
so we are all you
a small part of each of us
is the moon
& she's beautiful
i said we are all the moon
& we are all butterflies
who think living for a day
is living for a lifetime
even though some of us
can't keep going
especially after seeing our naked bodies
& the first time i looked
into the mirror after cutting my hair
i was finally beautiful
just kidding
i have always been beautiful
the moon swore she heard someone crying
outside of our window
we ignored it
she said i think we should really check on them
& i said we're always feeling glaciers moving
at the bottom of our stomachs
i said this to no one in particular
so then the moon asked me
when i started wearing glasses
& at this point
you had gotten out of bed
to get some water
so you didn't hear this part
but i said
i can remember when my dad started wearing glasses
but not my mom
my mom can't really see me anymore
& then the room filled up with air
the kind that fills up rooms
before it rains
the moon asked me
if i ever experienced
a major death in my family & i said
no
can we go back to talking about how beautiful you are
can we go back to talking about all the love poems
i tried to write for each bridge i've walked over but never did
can you watch me foam at the mouth with every cloud
that ever existed
but slowly disappeared
& then you came back into the room
but it was too dark so i didn't notice
& continued to tell the moon about the time my astronomy professor
told my class that we were never supposed to be here
& how us being here
alive on earth
is the same probability of winning the lottery 100,000 times
how fucked up is that?
& then i had to leave the room because i needed to cry in the rain
so i'm not sure what you & the moon talked about which is fine i guess
i just want to know
will you please stop leaving all the photographs in the fridge?
pressing the buttons on a camera makes strawberries
according to a four year old
who is taking pictures of beautiful things
with a camera that doesn't work
& before the moon left
she made everything quiet for us
so we could hear the universe's slow hum
i could imagine the weather
on the day every person i know was born
the first day of K's life was probably the only day in october
that held rain
because she's always crying
& i'm always feeling reflections of rainbows when she laughs
i told the moon this
& she said thank you
& turned me into stardust while you were pulling out
your eyelashes unintentionally
she climbed back into the sky
with a sign the read
the inverse of you
is the universe
i know that's not always enough

3.

please stop being beautiful in front of me because it is very hard to live when you are right next to a person, a beautiful one, like yourself. Mercury is spinning around us & there are currently no plans but soon I will end up saying something like Maybe we should just elope & you will say But my family needs to be there & I will say We should buy a farm so your family can come visit us on it. you will ask What about your family & I will open the window then ask Where are all the fucking seagulls? sometimes October rings inside my ears. sometimes I want to tell you I think it's time to start living like a tree before we turn into tables. you will give me a look like the look I give any child under two who can't tie their shoes & I will say Don't worry, I promise to be better just after I press my hand into some wet soil.

4.

here is a love letter to my body / thank you for fixing me up when I fall on a hard sidewalk & also fuck you for making me cry in every single bathroom / this is starting to get beautiful / & fuck anyone who thinks saying the word beautiful in a poem is wrong / this is a poem for the beautiful people who have felt like they were wrong / for everyone who still has caterpillar skin watching butterflies laugh around them / butterflies so light they can land on a person's nose / yeah / a nose / for everyone waiting patiently to be able to fly / clothes aren't gendered so why don't you go fuck yourself / i'm waiting for different colors to turn into me

Something floats along my eye, its gone now
Something floats along the Eagle Nebula
This object’s light diffuses across the memory of a long night
It can be seen reflected in the waxed linoleum floors of
The (now closed) Pathmark off North Broad Street

Turn off the florescent lights, then imagine 
Gliding across the Pillars of Creation in a
Chrome shopping cart

Back on earth, dust will fill the shadows of my hands
As the two form prayers
Underneath a clinic’s unassuming drop ceiling

Riding the bus, thinking about rough knuckles,
Hairy pits, and morning breath
Rereading messages, occasionally
Looking out the windows/imagining the self
Something unrealized but fulfilling

    “No answer, except acceptance” – they say to me as I walk out

Any minor gloom will turn the slim comfort of this
Distracting peasouper into a bed without pillows
So memorize the expression I make before saying “maybe”  
  As sand shoots up into the mesosphere, becomes glass,
And rains back down 

Capture the smell of this world ending in fire and remain cautious
Of shiny, yet sharp, things that only mirror the worst angles

yesterday i spent so long on the toilet that the sensory light switched off n all i could see was the colour black_

like that night we rode our bikes down the road between the thicket n it was like we could have kept riding n riding for the longest time n not have been anywhere, like what happens after you die

n it was so black i might of heard the wheels turn on the gravel, or your shallow cycling breaths, or the air conditioning, or a dripping tap, bare bottomed and the toilet bowl, or denim and a bike seat, or a duvet, or a womb, or Lisa

i.
i remember that brain melting
         boy that brain bursting
         but that was not like this
my blood being blessed
         by the tiny rivers the conduits ride between
         the earth and the world right next to it and the worlds right next to it
burn holes to flow through all of them
         all ride rivers of
         neurotoxic elixirs, love, these hemotoxins in my heart
         run through me like
                        oceans don't flow
                                 they twist and oscillate and dragpull all the fibers

in you
stretch like string fields bend light
priest, priestess
i bang these stars slow motion out my eyes for you
irises lost in this tide
         i'm absorbing all the light and everything that comes with it
if you knew what it was like being this close to the edge of a waterfall
                                    beating this hard
         you wouldn't speak
         it all ends up in the final water body

every olive sea krait that glides
         just a connector to another place and another place and another place
live coral reefs open to something else
these Thai warriors touch knee to solar plexus
         fangs to blood vessels
         send lightning through chests
         to awaken
i can see what that awakening would look like if i stayed or if i went
                                                   from here
those west lips want to taste me in the sunset
not the way i wanted you burned holes through me
         this path to the skyline isn't like
the boys left with big windows in their bodies
i saw it happen when i was nine
      blood those swamp bullets blow a man wide open to the sun
         (when i was ten my brother fell from the sky and broke his skull)
         not the same way the French are always so alone in cafés with their friends and in movies
         and i left you in that bar by yourself in Montreal with your family
         i still have poison in me from that night: the who was i and the how could i that won’t leave
but that bite
         bent me backward over my spine
         back around sacral

ii.

you walked toward me so tentatively
(the cervical balances the big egg brain so perilously)
said you would pounce on my scare if you ever saw it,
         glimpsing it almost never
it's always there for you,
         it's always there for you,
         it catches light in a different way since i don't fear the fire
                  i was ready for the injection
                           every initiation is a death
                     all the angels bring you back with coconuts

iii.

priest, priestess
these stars that i bang out my palms for you
explode as questions
what happens when all the little deaths converge into one big death
         is it the same but grander
does the flame flicker in the cosmic socket and not return
         what do you want to know
               all the poets today are afraid to sing stories
                  i’m just here to
                     answer sphinx questions
                     feel stone give way to windsands
even in paralysis this throb tilts my axis back towards the other pole
         we pretend eros is just in one place
                           but it’s everywhere
                                 woven into all that pulls
                           death has a magnetism
         that can rob me of my faces and my phrases if i get too close
               these aren’t just words
                     i’m right here
                           walking the xyst
                              through the black garden
         transmitting across the full bandwidth to anything that can listen
                                             THIS IS NOT MY PLACE YET
                  i have language snaking through double helixes and songs¹
                     a bursting heart pumping them out into the ocean
                              new freedoms to give/ideas to kill
what is really me starting to perfuse timeless lips
         inexorably wet like when you have no choice but to start a family
i can see the waves of my mother’s scream when she lost her first son slipping away
          she can’t scream again for her second
death doesn’t stand still
         it pulses and storms and diffuses through the walls until
                                                everything is soaked
it promises to free that slow lightning on rotation on your radio every day
i’m not a soothsayer
         but bodies were constructed for these transmissions they don’t contain them
                  and the avenues of my brain are widening
         for the second lining² in the streets that follows the grand boom
                  celestial static then trumpets ride that bass drum

_________
¹ “Nobody sings anymore.”
-Amiri Buraka

² “they don’t dance no more”
-Goodie Mob