Blue sky Green tree Black pen Red Bull Breeze topples over aluminum clanks against wood bench Push notification chirp Amex bill due Mostly fine. Chest is sunfried prairie Cattails float above creek Water collects their dead Zelda theme song stuck in my head melody floats a hum floats a dandelion wisp Mechanic bill pads statement I may not have locked my car door Fly crawls down my neck Muddy ground, twisted ankle Schedule doctor visit? Any extra hours at work available? Canker sore a spinning screw With dirt in my mouth, can I breathe? Dandruff clump smudged on glasses lens ATM receipts, cataracts Can the wind dry out my eyes? Am I Whitman or Simpson? tree branch severed my detached spine Blue sky Green tree blue sky green tree

on an unpaved trail half-mile 5 minutes removed from my big screen and sectional cocoon, fresh off a Ghibli double feature from Totoro’s forest to mid-july iowa humidity like a forest sprite I leap from tree leave to flower petal to ps4 joysticks hover just over an earth or burrow inside of an earth but never land on this earth forage the woods for faces you may have left there but do not speak their names pull creatures from a screen and share your life your toothbrush your small minutes with them with their home with the clump of your brain that is shooting flares to find home the our nights are all shadowed eyes in bushes in leaves hymns floating from dandelions we build shelter from fallen tree branches, from falling tree branches we tie splits in the wood together with film reel we insulate with mud of other worlds i am breathing iowa air i am kicking for solid ground with both hands tied above my head with limestone glowing in my fists gathered from land yet uncultivated

Humming birds Sweat beads Nose hair and how it traps hot stone scent Bug bites Dead leaves Pigment spot in decade old plasma screen Hole in the fabric on my chest my cheap T shirt Sunburn around ingrown hair Frays on edges of gifted Spider-Man wallet Center ring of a tree Facebook pfp of a friend the page now dedicated to memory Hummingbirds Sweat beads

I am older than I’ve ever been I will never be as old as an oak But I did not see 27 at 16, 17, 18-22, beyond even I am not a Cobain, not a Hendrix I have shakier fingers, and a pen The wooden balcony beneath my feet is not ablaze/ I am a frostbitten hand In 80 degree heat, riverside humidity I skip my cones and rods across the water I borrow color from the sunbeams on the ripples The fish leap and borrow air they do not need I steal time from the breeze Scrape bark to build an armored suit of the most permanent years I can grasp A song is in my head that has never not existed to me I can only outlast expectations Everything is a splinter

Soft waves roll a crushed coke can to the lake’s surface This morning, I screenshotted another obituary for a person I used to know that now everybody used to know Soft waves roll a crushed coke can tadpoles race in loops, swimming from doom A friend texts me a new Star Wars trailer It is a cash grab, but kids will love it, I’m sure I remind myself how I loved The Phantom Menace Soft waves roll a crushed coke can Spiders crawl on the remnants of a beaver den On my walk to the water The oaks around me were momentary mysteries A puzzle attempted over and over, not yet completed by those who are now bones Soft waves roll a crushed coke can My eyes buzz overtop a Hellboy omnibus Right now I sink my hands into mud Cling to this, my second body, hoping I can be part of what spins We will be bones let us be bones together

I didn’t recognize any of the players’ names A childhood love now A splintered, discarded slugger I haven’t been by the Mississippi in a few years now The waters flow, the bluffs tower with or without me I’ve been to 3 movies in as many years the 10,000th MCU film will make billions with or without my eyes I am still calmed by water of storms, of lakes, of rivers I still feel cattail pricks when I clench my fist I used to sing of mangled stardust, of palpitations, of our electricity there are now wildflowers in my throat on my tongue I am scared to taste how they sound

hairs in my nose collect gravel dust ground pushes the sweat into the ratty fabric on my back a formation of markings make one big perspiration rorschach blotter stones beneath me tell me what they see i am only their gaze, the blood on their sharpest edges

I am the gnats in my ear a doom-be-damned buzz, a body in a sweat resin Do I move by wings or by wind?

check my email sitting on a trail bench “Wario” is carved into the backrest weeds grow out of the cracked concrete they perry with each other are unwanted things learning to want inbox is mostly spam no one wants anything more than doordash wants my paycheck in exchange for a crunchwrap a hummingbird flutters over the bench i assume it does not know who wario is or what a crunchwrap supreme tastes like or how to float without flying

There are a handful of months of my life I do not really remember where I wasn’t really here and of course the exact here then was different than what here is now but what I am saying is that I was the helium freshly squeezed out of its balloon dissipating and watching the only body its known its only home float off what I am saying is maybe I was a persob maybe I was here but I don’t know I am still searching for what that here was right now I think I mean here as the same ground as the same sky as the same river that flows out of my chest as the same skin as the same bones I have always known I have always known I have maybe never known flashes of lost days show up sometimes prescription bottles paper plates with ketchup stains bed sheets stuck to skin with sweat warm with the smoke of kinetic energy burnt up by a body that did not then feel like my body and through the prairie and through whatever distant labyrinth hidden in each burrowed nest some sprite some flame some boulder just some pebble maybe a bug a fish fly maybe whatever busted off sliver of me that tries its best to keep me here whatever part of me that got too sick of the other parts but whatever part otherwise would not have let those months turn into steam turn into empty monster energy drink cans as pillows turn into netflix binges of shows and movies I could not give you a single detail about now into into into into into i don’t know anything else there’s an alf poster in my office and I don’t really know why it’s there I was born in 1995 and alf ended in 1990 I never caught any reruns but I read a tweeted screenshot of a comment on an alf message board once where someone said “he look like a dang creature” and now I say “he look like a dang creature” about a hundred times a day and I know there’s no good reason this should turn into an alf poem and maybe this is more avoidance than volta but my therapist tells me that when it is hard to find here that I should just start naming things that I see feel hear and sometimes I do find myself wishing they still made shows like alf I find myself wishing for a distant home wishing for a nostalgia tainted here that never really was there for me while i pluck bluebells and peonies from my pores and sometimes when I am wishing my absent months were somewhere I could find I sometimes find that I am searching for forgiveness and maybe alf forgives me maybe letting myself look at a stupid alf poster that latches myself to a here that I have somehow made is the closest I get to forgiving I have a here I am a here I have been allowed a here and I am so happy for that but sometimes the mercy is what feels the most like heartbreak

I bend towards crystallized summer midnights My skull cracks and oozes along the grain of a snapped tree branch no longer armored by bark by its own forever. What is left A dozen sharp fingers fail to meet each other

My instinct says Donatello, nerdy, reserved, turtles seem more nerdy, reserved than anything else But I digress I crave the comfort of knowing what I’m getting I’d like each turtle to wear a little turtle mask that tells me if they are rude and crude or perhaps even a party dude or perhaps a portal perhaps just a turtle but perhaps a library of a lifetime of movies, cartoons of sashes tying memories to bodies I ask the box turtle bobbing by the lake which ninja turtle he is and the sun on the water stops sparkling Maybe I do not digress perhaps little turtle masks are little tourniquets perhaps I am growing a shell perhaps I am a shell perhaps comic strips line me perhaps flower petals sit in clumps like stones in a throat like a shell abandoned and one with the prairie grass perhaps a shell is rolling off a bluff and while its assorted insides scatter it watches the river get closer

Taurine transports me to shoddy gas station dining seats i used to sneak to to kill dreams with friends on summer midnights i cannot manage sleeplessness like i used to i chase my caffeine with water now and apologize to the dandelion wisps in the air for single-use aluminum but I hold the tacky branding in my hand and i sing an ode to all to that makes my heart race an ode to lesser vices an ode to drinks shared to cans piled in corners of bedrooms an ode to the stained glass portraits we painted of each other on ginseng buzz an ode to what propels me from branch to branch from lily pad to lilly pad an ode to prairie lily to ironweed to bulrush to bee balm to each memory i let live in each petal each blade in each drop of water in each l-carnitine molecule to anything that lets me be awake that lets me be here to the caffeinated lotus i keep in a locket each petal a face stored for safe keeping

Are you trying to hide in the grass or is the grass something else to you, an entity hiding you, despite your desires We have painted you poorly in folktales in G.I. Joe cartoons, in Taylor Swift videos, but maybe you are not lurking, waiting to betray our false security You cannot help but be unseen Are you hiding? Or is the grass too filled with shed skins you cannot abandon?

my tissue is wrapped mostly in algae, in sediment still drifting i do not shed naturally i pick away the few skin cells that remain

I am small as the goslings across the lake relatively speaking. I have a body that is capable of hurt I want the goslings to stay small forever but to never know what that means A shrub floats on the water and the hairs on my arms wave in the breeze I have held the river in my arms Jeweled it with sunflowers Dog barks in the distance and the goslings scatter They know of their smallness They want to live Somewhere there are bodies causing hurt. They are small but do not know their smallness Or they do, They have never held the river in their arms, or they have, and pretended they could control the light dancing on its waves

Not because I blame the grass, (I don’t) Not because we haven’t already abused the dirt enough. (we have) Not because we deserve a man made void. (we don’t, no matter who asks for one) But because there are words that will split our tongue like that of a snake’s and handcuff the forked spawns of themselves together. Though the language is indecipherable, (we will try harder) something may radiate out from each blade of grass set ablaze (we will hold them until the flame hits our thumb)

Because I have learned to wander to the blast beat rhythm of the Heretic Anthem to sniff daisies in the midst of downtuned distortion I bend towards, past, the wildflowers and scrape/ a dirt nest in the earth for a 16 year-old me/ and I will say to them you do not need your rage/ but you can hang it on a spiderwort stem, wait, bleed, grab it,/ protect yourself if you must, it is your right to have it you do not/ need to sleep in the arms of shattered trees/ anymore i promise i am still picking out each splinter left behind/ your job is done my throat is all petals and pollen i will still scream/ along with you with 8 the blood in our shared esophagus/ will continue to boil i promise it is not your fault that it must i push my fingers into the edge of my sockets i paint my brando eyes black and mail them to california to you please have them please keep them safe i will think of you you do not need to be tired anymore i am so tired of disappearing leaves of flood of foreclosures your friends have died i am sorry i am trying to breathe in sulfur and exhale lavender fields i am trying to spit out the poison oak on my tongue i am trying to tape the tattered and torn prairie grass back together while tornados dance on park benches but i am so tired of wind of wings of gravestones floating on the water why do they want us dead if i lose i promise it is not your fault, it is not your battle anymore let me be your pulse let you be my heart murmur i am surfacing please, please rest now

The wasps on the brush wave to me we both understand it is not our fault if we hurt each other I have always felt ogre-like I am whole in mossy water I am home in bramble I am not a bed of thorns I am an onion I can shape shift i can staple thorns to my skin if i wish to in the kingdom of far away shrek learns to shape shift and we learn why not to there may be exceptions (are there exceptions) fallen trees are now bridges are now homes are now new shrek becomes new in his sameness a swamp can still, must still, be shared i do not eat eyeballs i string them together and garland the milkweed I whistle all star through a blade of grass and wait for who hears it for who arrives i am here i am home i am an ogre this is my swamp and it is yours too, i bathe in mud, clear my face with algae i pray in rotten toothed song i pray to the water i pray to the land below i pray to donkeys and mice and big bad wolves i clasp my fingers at the water's surface i let it stain my hands green before the wasps pull me to land pull me into sky i shape shift but i am always a swamp even as i become a bouquet of coneflowers floating, hurtling towards the sun, towards every lost frog balloon burnt up in the stratosphere i am alive i am a feat of 3d animation i am each spirit scattering from distant, heavy, footsteps this is repentance this is an earwax candlestick this is forgiveness this is my swamp

my tv is a field of echinacea ablaze pyromaniacs running free the prairie before me is a window is a cracked screen a disruption of the static my spine is rotted fish skeletons stitched together i am scared but I will still sit on the couch in a metallica t and throw up the horns i am at peace i am young when buried under bluebells i am young when beavis sings “breaking the law breaking the law” i felt less young than i should have when i was young but in new worlds in crude pencil marks in cottonwood trunks i find missing years i am butthead in a sundress throwing daisies i wear the petals of bygone selves in a crown around my head so i can hold them to my chest when i need to i am a body growing wildflowers i am cornholio forever