My hands migrate from your neck,
                            across your chest,
                            down your back,
                            over your hips,
                            along your thighs,

and I can't help but contemplate
how you contain so much wonder
in such a tiny 
space.

I could spend days counting freckles,
                               tracing collarbones,
                               stroking curls,
                               outlining shoulder blades,
                               caressing cheeks,

and I don't think I could ever find an
appropriate place to lay down my hands
and stop touching
you.
                              

Small flashes of violence,
your lips stained violet kissed silence
onto porcelain. Below wrinkled cheeks your chin
keeps time with your speaking
but I'm thinking more about how your grin
hides teeth that have ripped through skin onto bone -
and had I known beforehand, I'd've taken precautions.

Often lost in the way your fingers lingered over my spine
and divided my halves into yours and mine.
Chapped lips and bony hips crashing like a wave sinking ships
and thinking this is what it feels like when guilt trips
over his own feet.

Two particles meet.

Metaphorically dismembered, you'd never remember
to put me back in the order I was stored in, only
pour me back down the drain, again.

Prisoner in daisy chains,
though the days changed I stayed 
rooting deeper in your garden, guarded by
lost souls hiding behind the holes in your story.

I've wasted time filling these spaces
and placing back stories to nameless faces,
and bracing for the impact of you
cracking under pressure.

Hesitating when unfamiliar hands began
tracing rough plans along my waist
where dust and dirt had settled. 

I traded these things for guitar sting callous,
not as bad as what they'd have thought - 
I still got chills up my spine with blistered fingers
running over skin that's been trying to hide for so long
that it forgot that getting caught up and tangled
in someone could mean a good thing.

What heavy eyelids failed to see -
             skies erased by a thousand bird wings
             fighting for first chance Alaska
though not for lack of trying.

Throw them out to sea.,
forget them, baby.
They can't speak.
They can't breathe.
Don't plea with me.

No apologies.

No apologies.

 No apologies.

Here, it's easy
the way they do on tv.

Listen baby,
carefully:
no one's free.
No one's free.

No
one
is
free.

No apologies.

I have so many
                       holes
that no matter 
                       how 
              hard
I try to stay
                 full,

I just can't
                quite
                         manage -
not without
            losing
bits 
& pieces
               of my
self.

there was composure
somewhere in between
charmer's almanac
and basset sounds
but i drowned it
with coffee grinds
and gas pedals

Your heart was deciduous -
just when it looked like you were golden,
you flashed red before my eyes
and left me alone,
freezing.

Every year your love for me grows
until I lose you to the cold.

I still think
that the ugliest 
part of you
is my reflection
in your eyes.

I have seen your spirit asphyxiate you in fits of rage;
watched you breathe new meaning through old lungs.
You're not done with breaking -
not content to lose yourself in this wilderness
or fall victim to ancestral traps.
Instead, you fill yourself with stories and let them split open your sides,
they spill out through your fingertips.
You roll personalities over your teeth and experiment with tastes.
There's no definition of "home" here, though you've mapped these characters
and converged their fault lines with your own arteries.
Their cold eyes pierce through mineral and wood,
raw and carved by prairie winter frost.
Inhale tobacco, exhale life:
shaman of an unknown nation in an abandoned land,
you touch life in these faces and channel their ghosts.

Take advice from the whiskeyjacks, dear, 
and keep your rabbit's foot for luck.

Walls aren't crumbling here, nor sidewalks.
Only my body onto bedsheets
while sparrows cry elegies during summer's funeral procession.

Though I find some thing's sacred about Canadian northern lights,
I can't help but think of the land of the glass pinecones
and the sound of your voice,
an accent I still can't place.