you & your mother were asleep in the trailer park

sometimes I need to sit back and take in another person's devastation
to visit the bittersweet but only in transit

placing the ambient darkness of Me into a bag that I can
hold rolled in my hand until the album scratches, over.

Here is a list of people I have thought I was [you will find my name absent]:
Anne Frank
Ava Gardner
Erwin Schrodinger
Eurydice
Franny
Jesus Christ
Kurt Cobain
Marilyn Monroe
Orion Escher Redinger, unfortunately lost to chance


my father


the drugs told me I was literally all of them
Truth showed me they are everyone and so am I

but who is she more than me?

this is a poem about Daniel

(and every boy I've ever loved)

if you are sweet to an artist

if you are good to Him, if you

cast light on the parts of him He is

disinclined to see

you will find yourself in his art,

the Experience Manifest.

if you torment

and occupy him,

if he fights the idea of you while she is close

but sings for you  

six shots out the door

you will find yourself in his body

of work.

if you kiss an artist

and he looks beyond you,

somehow cannot marvel your body

(would that he could, only--)

He is unaffected & you can taste it.

you can find no part of yourself

in what he does.

but She is there,

look

I'm not coming back

but it's okay for you to find this
I don't like to think about who I have been

this is a time capsule;
someday I will regret this one, too

but I'm so glad I found you
(and you and I guess you, too)

It's Everything All the Time and I hate being everything because
it makes my eyeliner run and that is the primary source of my identity

BUT my new thing is "don't seek"
because it already is

I love you