In ashen fish I.

bleakest morning, still sweating the moment into damp tendons & smoldering remainder of last night’s blighted fires put out w/ shame. stomach growls at the lungs, the brain aches above a nerve twisted, the useless thumb we return again to faulty evolution, ashen fish.

II.

my spit clings to each word, & regrets truth I have been unlucky enough to confront recently, to’ve soaked all these sheets with. offer an absolution by excusing me, let my absence clock a time we’ll save by sewing shame shut with clever scissors & renew my silence.

III.

There is no misses. An absolute shelter. Love is so: thrones. Stow a slate roof’d heart-attack after a soul’s sku I scan. In some breakfast food aisle of well- mulled memories. Being is against its own saying, the ar- gument stilled by our weakening of each other’s ungov- erned lust. As fear thins, as footfalls conjugate goings, as the rain rains & chills chill us both.

IV.

Don’t be careless of necessity, neither mine nor your own. Don’t sleep against time, or speak against names, or fuck yourself with a broken hand and broken head and a broken heel. Settle the debt you think you owe, you who’ve given goblets of surrender, a full chalice of succession, ash-heap of hope that to lie in the missing moments allows what your coming has never let arrive.