CONFESSIONS part one
collections of poems, autumn 2024
I
but the bed sheets stink of sweat and hair oil
unrendered souls seeking tenderness in midwinter
what of the heart if not to surrender to it
I, who has lost meaning in the words
wide-eyed, demystified by nineteen years
of awakening to a dissected body
transcending from a self-made destruction
studying its depth before I run away from myself
the touch quenching all your capricious deaths
balancing the weight of terminability on my forehead
I am continually craving something other
shifting the furniture so my room seems bigger
so the dawn has more space to occur
II
But the skyline dips perfectly above your hairline
creating a finite reverberance that blinds & reaches everywhere.
Do you close your eyes to it or hold it in your palms?
The skin beneath your nails turned blue on the walk home.
Waking to write a poem & becoming something,
bodiless recollection of finding yourself extinguished on the sidewalk.
The mind tumbling around like a flightless bird,
eroding with unknowability until it's over.
III
slight buzz in the calamity of mid-afternoon seem further than I remember
clemency fashioned from your saliva sublimates my second skin into the shower drain
lethargic from the beginning but it keeps beckoning me elsewhere
thinking the skyline would’ve reached me sooner but I became a blur in the light
everyone else was fooled by failed recognition but I did not wait that is when you say do not leave but I do anyway
no matter how carefully you remove the bullet from the body with your fingertips
out of spite the heart recognizes itself in magnified absenteeism
IV
daring of living in fleshly reconciliation
incapable of separating the body and the repulsion
underbelly lays open but wants nothing personal
the home I built cannot contain me
despite my limbs neatly folded beneath the table
emerging from the unfeeling when flinching at each blue
spark ripping right through this languid body and mind
which are mine but otherwise shocked into oblivion
V
8 am, the sky-splitting daybreak mercifully
declining into the dawn for deliverance
and tiptoed into worldly bores,
into the first snow twinkling
nostalgia of childhood sleep,
a full breakfast table, cut fruits,
call to grandparents across an ocean,
sunrise-tinted windowpanes,
multidimensional fantasies,
a dream so large I left my hometown for it.