I feel like I am becoming an owl. The night invigorates me. Its an inverse universe and I belong to it. I feel at ease in its vague shroud. The day time lets me see too much. The night air glosses over all the wrinkles, cracks in the pavement, and dead grass in the yard. She gives me instead beaconing lighthouses lining the sidewalks and strange, material winds that seem to wrap their hands around me like shy and passionate lovers. The night is my lover. She doesn't speak. She doesn't rely on plastic imagery and gaudy color. She doesn't explain herself before she acts upon me. She just takes me under her thick, nourishing wing and silently prods and licks and beckons and reveals. She doesn't know those baser senses. And she makes me forget about them myself for a little while. At least until I can no longer push through that thick, sweet night fuzz and drop to my grave for the scathing, scalping sun too soon to come.

Mourning comes. I wake up confused and longing, waiting for colors to fade, counting the hours until I can escape my muscles, and my skin, and the yellow of my hair, and everything else that wears me down.

-s

my senses, oh my wondrous senses, bloomed inside of me. scents, breezes, sun rays, glimmers of light on water, animals, swaying branches, glittering leaves, swirling dandelion fluff, they all blossomed in front of me as if a numbing, blinding skin had been shed from my entire being. god, i fucking felt so alive! i felt present. not for want. content. i could have not cared about my impending death any less because i had what i wanted: the sensitivity to be completely overtaken by everything right at that moment.

-s

stop smiling at me

you're blurring
that pernicious
thread

between passion
and
mere
sympathy

-s

when you finally listen
to the voices
inside your head

the voices
that tell you
to pick
your neighbors flowers
and eat them

the sweet voices
that earn you candy
from a kind old man
you pay ninety dollars
an hour

the glorious
drownded
voices

to which you
tied anchors,
buried in a trench,
and marked
with a cloudy grave

and yet
here they are
back again
simple and sweet
and undefiled
covered in honest blood
like a baby
fresh cut
from her mother's garden

when you finally listen,
the whole dialect
of the world
turns into an alien tongue

and then all you can do
is do
what your little head
understands

-s

the horror movie
of the day
is walking out the door
and knowing
that the cement
beneath my feet
only has to meet
my head
with just

enough

force

and i'll be dead

-s

Drugs.

-Dominick

words

dictionary-
you phrophetic stone

from six to eleven
i wrote your orders
reverently
and stored them
neatly between my ears.

never satisfied
until i had the spelling

correct
correct enough
to transcribe myself

correct enough
to belch orders,
to construct picture frames
and a snug jacket

then the year struck
that i filled up the jacket

completely.
the buttons dug their teeth
into my belly-

and i realized
it didn't fit anymore

-samantha