lyrics
my heart
is an electric chair
where everything
you are to me
(the trembling in your arteries
their harmonies and artistry),
burns,
glows,
smolders as a coal field cloaked by the cold
the unfolded snow.
the smoke from you will write itself
as cursive in the air.
the verses form a perfect square
of graphite
called sky.
and i wait,
always beneath the torrent
of its breaking,
myself naked,
shaking.
acrid,
it blacksmiths my body,
painfully embraces me,
erasing the trace
of any grace in me:
your name and face,
a vacancy
the place that you were sacred
and awake in me.
(it anoints every inch of me:
a permanent ash wednesday.)
this is all a testament
to the sentiments of your distance.
an infinite between,
the cruelest of all tyrants
i'm trying
not to speak with words
that are your silence.
(why i can't be anything but your absence.)
(so i beg of you,
envelop me.
make my lack yours
and yours mine,
so that together,
we will be all.
otherwise,
we are only a breath
a word
away
from falling apart.)
i can never love you
in the way that i want to
is the meaning
of the space
that separates my skin
and yours.
still,
it will fill my speech with sand
and call every one of my words a lie.
i agreed from the beginning.
my tears were my reply:
why the sand turned to mud:
an expanse without fathom:
midnight of the forest floor,
pit that is a crow's eye,
the moment before
the birth of my child.
(all of this balloons inside of us.
we are years pregnant with a void.)
i will never say a word.
instead,
i close my lips and you call it
our love.
i will be your husband.
i am a father.
and you call it
our love.
when you die,
having never felt pain,
having never shed a tear
because of me,
i will have loved in the way that wanted.
i will call it
my love.
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released May 1, 2011
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