by Michael Dwayne Smith
We spin in our little boy beds. Top speed: imperceptible, inevitable. Waiting to be split. Collided. Exploding into world. Veering off into our steamy nights of future. Disappearing, one blue molecule at a time.
Slick-pages under my mattress ignite. Energy, release, repeat—obsession consumes, an effigy of red licorice. My charred lips will stencil black kisses over six hundred salty miles of flesh, of curves, and suspense. We shall be the polluting of sad girls rescued from small town bars, the liquor of one last hope, fuel burning into gravitational collapse.
Are we still in bed? I can feel the quantum space my organs used to fill. Oxygen under blankets. I think about good health, the good life, but can't paint a likeness. And wonder about love, but don't try to hide in anyone's quiet, or cigarette lit darkness. Green glowing eye of carbon monoxide alarm, you comfort me more than you could ever know.
Sleep is a paper boat. I'm soggy with memory. Fog creeps over the ocean, event horizon, and I am, or am not fusion, and I wake or soon imagine I wave toward a far shore, breaking against an imprint of stars on the rocks that rock in the sway of cooling planets and tides, floating upside down and backward, beneath my very own particle-thin slice of inverted yellow moon.
Slick-pages under my mattress ignite. Energy, release, repeat—obsession consumes, an effigy of red licorice. My charred lips will stencil black kisses over six hundred salty miles of flesh, of curves, and suspense. We shall be the polluting of sad girls rescued from small town bars, the liquor of one last hope, fuel burning into gravitational collapse.
Are we still in bed? I can feel the quantum space my organs used to fill. Oxygen under blankets. I think about good health, the good life, but can't paint a likeness. And wonder about love, but don't try to hide in anyone's quiet, or cigarette lit darkness. Green glowing eye of carbon monoxide alarm, you comfort me more than you could ever know.
Sleep is a paper boat. I'm soggy with memory. Fog creeps over the ocean, event horizon, and I am, or am not fusion, and I wake or soon imagine I wave toward a far shore, breaking against an imprint of stars on the rocks that rock in the sway of cooling planets and tides, floating upside down and backward, beneath my very own particle-thin slice of inverted yellow moon.