I have never concerned myself with divinity.
Lofty concerns, as such,
stay on the rim of the eyes
Of virtuoso and priests.
I have only known this existence,
And have only cared for you.

I have always believed my life to be meaningless
But you paint it in a way that just
Happens to look like a picture
That has meaning.

All I know about love
I’ve known from the blood-filled sink in your blue room.
And from the rushed dream,
you unsheathed on your bathroom wall
Of us looking directly at the sun at its zenith.

We might never get there,
Yet, you can still take
Every straggly ten-cent word I’ve written
For//about you and fill the small room
You locked yourself in that made you believe
The world will only love you dismembered.

When you hold me against your repository of grief,
When you wear your trauma as a heirloom around your waist.
And again and again, you find me
In quiet rooms, where I scream how I love you.
The same rooms where we have jabbed knives,
And atoned for our love being so violent.

Yet, when we return to those rooms
I’ll take the ivy from your throat
And make you feel at home.

I am no longer asking,
Myself or you
Did we do everything we could have
To keep us in time?
Instead, I want to die knowing
I took all the right turns
Wore your favourite coloured rough-hewn sweaters
And all of it has led to me
Keeping my sunburnt hand on yours.

Spiralling clouds and
My shrinking field of vision
Inside a place made of ultralight beam.
However long we have to love,
However long there is left of the summer
And as this sunset burns and dies,
On a stained glass
It is beautiful out today.

At summer’s end, we will
Drive off to the furthest end
Of the Mississippi River
And live on as moonshiners
On the cusp of conviction.