I will gather the voices of strangers mouthing my name.

not like a mouth might speak, more like two hands make whispered contact through their finger-ends.

We’ve kissed all weekend; we want to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

. . . dissolving us into the endeavor of love hold me to your song it is delicious hear you one more time in middle of night tooth it open love all unloved parts without pause

I would make a burnishing of you, by which I mean a field in flower, by which I mean, a breaching – my hands making an arrow of themselves, rooting the loosened dirt.

We slipped switchblades in the back pockets of our jeans, spray-painted backdoors. I named my knives after you. We cried in the desert. California.

You will fall in love with someone who’s cold and always seemingly pushing you away. When all is said and done, they will be forever known as the one person you couldn’t get to love you.

Inside me, a prescient fire is coated with warning. Born into violation, that vast net of mourning hair.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . . When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.

Respect whatever pain you bring back from your dreaming but do not look for new gods in the sea.

And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

With the slightest pressure you take the ripe moon and press it against your lips. ''you taste like a toothache''.

My tears ache to become stars.

A fierce red rage comes, and he almost kills him there. But he would have to let go of me. He cannot. He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of his chest, like the wings of a moth.

being known is being loved.

that night we curled into each other aware one of us would leave roses tears & kisses on our tombstone the next november 9th.

Mom, my messy life is getting muddier and muddier, and only now do I realize the brightest and clearest part of my memories has always been with you.

Neither of us knew what we wanted but would do anything to have it.

i wish i were a girl again, half-savage and hardy and free, and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them; why am i so changed? why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? im sure i should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills

As I got older, I learned I'm a drinker / Sometimes, a drink feels like family

Somebody hold me too close Somebody hurt me too deep

There is no saint without an audience.

I am so tired of waiting, Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two - And see what worms are eating At the rind.

Why do I dream of you? Or is this you haunting me?

And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup

She’s in her city, meeting her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.

I don't know what to do without you / I don't know where to put my hands

What if, in another universe, I deserve you?

May I be made into the vessel of that which must be made when we wake to desire.

you, drunk as an uncle, making all kinds of nonsense sense i listen for the language between your words

I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.

You stay soft, get eaten / Only natural to harden up

Ash makes you clean, as alkaline as it is a grief.

And I'm scared to lose What's left of you And I should forget But I love what's left.

the branches of silence are heavy with your sweet seed

I am saved by the fact that you exist

You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit, You say the whole worlds ending, honey it already did.

I will gather the voices of strangers mouthing my name.

We were like people newly in love who 'can't take their eyes off each other.' This was not love, but it was something equally intense, and even more immediately a matter of life and death.

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying, Geryon please.

Now that you’re not my baby / I'll go do whatever I want / No need to turn around to see what’s behind me / I don’t care

And there's nothing I can do, not much I can change / So I give it up to you, I hope that's okay

And we'll all run together / Underneath the morning stars / Won't you come out with us anymore?

Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won’t say just.

We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. This intensity, this heat, sun like a disc-saw through your body.

they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: 'Wake up and ache for your life.'

''No matter how much you love somebody,'' she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, ''how do you live out the days?''

peeling a clementine is so easy. it comes so naturally. it's inviting - the clementine wants to be peeled. it's melancholic, sanguine. but an orange? what is an orange but a nuisance

Don't we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck.

Poets are just as responsible for empire building as any other professional hacks.