empty hands sit still

between the knife and the sunlight

and the flowers reaching up to meet their father.

and to think,

he has tendons—

fluid and eyes

all his own. flesh across timespace is still so

warm somehow. his heartbeat echoes an empty answer and i think

what is keeping you,

sweet violet brightening the grass-nest,

so low to the ground i know you’re

not afraid of hell?

strange to state the obvious,

that a man is not merely a concept but a

walking immolation of all i ever thought myself

limited to being.

his life alone his

makes resonance within me and i think

ah.

this

is what my bones were made for—

to be made whole in his hands,

and to be unmade,

and be made again to be unmade again.

fingernails filthy with the sap of my core,

you human hell—

how can you stand to see your own hand’s shape

where another’s chest once was?

this struggle against immanent expiration

is so sharp and dense—

like jellied milk against my nostrils, sour like an unripe plum

wrinkling my mouth.

rot as i rot, then—

and be reborn as an insect

whom greater creatures give less thought to than

the lashes shed from their eyes as they are dreaming.

henceforth, make my name absent from your tongue.

i have already forgotten yours.

time shakes us loose and we become the prayer tie dangling

from the trees last year that is not gone

even though it is no longer there. it is not gone because it was remembered, in the same way our dead friends are remembered in the tangled lips that

haven’t happened yet. i haven’t said the words because they do not really

fit the feeling, you see. they are simply not haunted

enough / insufficiently surreal—

if i was to say that you are the

king of bees / wings unravelled by the tall blue / a

gash on the face of reality that bleeds honey / that i want to lick that

honey from the gash until its clean / until its raw / until i am fat, you would say

‘what the hell are you

talking about?’

and i’d say

‘???’—

so here we are—

silent /

dangling /

not yet /

until it’s gone.

I never wanted to become a poet; I became one out of necessity.

I became one to make sense of the tired mess of being human. The truth is that I’ve always thought being a poet was kind of embarrassing. I’ve never enjoyed reading my poetry out loud and I even dread writing it sometimes. It’s like releasing the valve on a pressure cooker. You just have to do it, you know? It’s not about pleasure or aggrandizement. It’s about naming what’s there and coming into relationship with it.

I have been publishing poetry on Substack for nearly 4 years now. At first, I wasn’t proud of what I was creating, and I was embarrassed to show it to anybody. From the outside looking in, I’m sure nobody was aware of this. However, in time, I started to create things that I could be proud of. I started to receive some acknowledgement that my poetry was meaningful to others. I felt like, even on bad days, I could keep going.

I think about some of my favourite writers—Mary Oliver, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut. I think about what might have happened if they decided their work wasn’t worth being shared with the world. I don’t compare myself to them in terms of skill or greatness by any means, but still, I imagine there is someone out there in the world who will read my poetry and find a reason to go on living because of it. When I think about that, I feel like I can go on living too.

So, here it is, a collection of original poems I have written over the past two years. You can buy a physical copy of it and hold it in your very own hands. I hope it feels as special to you as it does to me.

Happy underworlding.

GET A COPY

as i am watching crows

a faceless man in my imagination tells me i am beautiful

and asks if he can kiss me.

half of my mouth tells him that he is

blind. i think it’s funny, this joke at my expense. he

does not laugh. he never tells me i am beautiful

again. the other half of my mouth begins to chuckle and

grin. my grin is so wide that it splits

time. my grin is so wide that my face begins to

crack and blood spills out of the corners of my mouth, which is freshly torn across each cheek.

it

hurts. the blood hasn’t even

turned red yet. the blood splays out into ten

strands like two sets of hands with five fingers each. the

blood reaches forward to grasp his face. his

face is smeared with my blood. his

face is smeared with my blood. covering my

cracked and bleeding split-time face with one

hand—like a lady—i sigh. i’m

sorry, i say to him. i’m

terrible at receiving compliments.

i want nothing more to know until the knowing

comes knocking. the drapes are drawn, the door is shut, i am

not home. longing is so sweet when first she enters, with a dream so

soft in it’s emptiness. she never mentions just how

hollow it can feel when she is gone in the morning, when

she leaves your hands weakened with the weight of

what you asked for.

what terror—this dream is alive and

breathing, waking me in the middle of the night

wanting. she never mentioned how its eyes would be so

tender looking up at me, saying ‘what now? what now?’ i never

pictured it quite this shape, this texture, never knew a dream could

be so heavy so warm so hungry.

i don’t know what to feed it. i

cradle it to sleep so in the respite i will have my own

chance to weep.

i do not know why i am weeping.

it is not the same reason why i wept before.

from an unknown origin, water falls to meet my eye as i am walking.

the source cannot be found but

the message can be heard:

you must weep,

for humanity is at war with itself.

previously

i had been swallowed by the endless hunger and the lightless sleep,

until a monk’s gleaming teeth released my tired heart from

the binding rope of rumination. you are not alone, his teeth said,

not because you are not you but because you are not there.

you are inertia: the neck’s curve backward etched by time and repetition

like sounds trapped in the ridges of a record.

each blood stained name

splattered across your phone screen is a siren

screaming you awake.

you must weep

your tongue is neither drug nor anaesthetic

you cannot conjure freedom from an atrophied imagination

i will not flinch when karma strikes

because i am not here to be at war. i am so well dissolved by sorrows edge that it makes me

melt in the warm mess of oblivion.

death’s worst kept secret is that it is life and i

promised not to tell anyone, but i wasn’t myself when i

promised that. not because something came to kill me, but because

i am death.

the shapeshifter

wanders through my naked mind again, his

face a different mask every moment.

i dream of my own body bare-skinned

in his arms. he is fully clothed and his

beard is scratchy.

i know that it was never really you or

anyone, i just can’t tell the difference between

unravellings; revelation or unreality?

i can’t tell between his

body fully clothed in light and

naked in my shadow.

someday a saint will share

another lover’s name and i will sew his

shed hair into mine.

i will not tell it

on the mountain. nobody

needs to know.

not even i.

i have had my eyes closed now

for a long time. the light you have had me carry is so

blinding, like headlights in a hall of mirrors. the only escape is

ignorance. but no matter how much i

like to pretend, i am not yet dead. you will come—yes,

you, the birthplace of all things, the way things change without

announcement, you—you will come to me, pulling

shards of broken glass away from my

windowpane, letting the sun-stream grind them down into

sparkling dust. i will drink it until my

blood is all space and

my bones are marks in an ancient stone between a little child’s hands. this is not the same as being dead, no, it is the same as being you—yes, you,

the one who wears death as a mask part-time

for your amusement—you, luminous shadow-blanket of

stars sighing in each other’s arms until yearning for return makes them

violent pools of gravity. pull the shards of my eyes from the windowpane. now i am made

gravity, collapsed upon itself.

there is a sword on my tongue

with your name on it. the reins that

i have held around my own neck have begun to

fray. i would not wish the way i

love and hate in equal measure on my

greatest enemy. the burning ache in me wants

everything to be still and quiet again but at some point

i decided to make the truth my only lover. truth loves like an

unkempt living room, thoughts strewn about the floor

like dirty laundry without shame. it sits in piles

until you grow tired of the sight

of your own mess. and what a mess

we have made.

perhaps instead i will stumble backwards in time

before i knew the terrible sound a heart makes when it stretches

to fit another body. it reminds me of the great sky-chasm borne of thunder’s rage or a hunter’s gunshot singing against the web of a forest. it reminds me of the wail of a child torn from its mother’s teat. but it also

reminds me of a beehive, humming with the nectar of devotion. it reminds me

of how the trees forget themselves for the forest until one of them falls and they are called to a bewildering mournfulness.

it reminds me of a wave tossing a boater here and there. the wave notices the boater like an eyelash upon its cheek. the paddle and the hips are made

to match its unforgiving pulse as they remember what gave them shape. if we are so made in relation, if we are the body and not just its parts, i like to think

we are two fibers on a fingernail, running right beside

each other. i don’t mind being so small—-

not when you are so small beside me.

they don’t teach you how to grieve a lovership that never was—

only to count the notches in your bed like

links in a chain and cross yourself after you

cum. they don’t teach you to

clean the blood off of your knees after a bar fight or to keep

that soft yearning animal in you neither seen

nor heard. but you

learn anyway, don’t you? how to make the tears run dryer than a

northeastern winter until you hear your mother’s

sleeping breath on the other side of these

too-thin walls. how to get away with a slight twist on that

family recipe with no one alive to see the way you’ve

changed things.

you’ve changed things.

i watched the fondness in me grow like

my swollen knees after that bar fight. somehow when i

cry for the loss of what i never had it

finds me on the other side of these

too-thin walls, stretching impish lips into a sign of

friendliness. it’s okay it’s okay-—it was always

going to be okay. they only teach you how to be strong when

things are not okay. but you learn how the hips can sway

when they’re sweet on someone, when they’re ready

to stop running. you learn anyway—how to change

things. how to be that soft

yearning animal, well fed.