natural anthem

I love you for writing poetry.

day twenty-three

please refrain from operating heavy machinery while on this regiment. that said, i want you to take this and drive to my office, hurdle tons of steel through an interstate vein so you can pull your tie harder around your neck, straighten the lines of your shirt and pants so that everything is symmetrical for interviews one, nine, twenty-six. you will have a success rate of 0.4%, but please refrain from being discouraged because these green pills the size of your canine teeth will reign things in.

you may not drink alcohol in tandem with these pills. note that the orange oblong 9 | 3 will corrupt and reverse. we consider this a paradoxical effect and is best explained as

you leave atlanta on a plane to bordeaux
while a plane in bordeaux leaves for atlanta
if both planes have yellow flags marked
in seats 17-C and 34-A--and remember
that certain immigration laws can catch you
in customs--where do the two overheated minds
meet?

you may be subject to random drug screenings to ensure you are maintaining your body well enough to meet our standards. to this extent, please piss in a cup and produce a panic attack on whether or not you have given enough as not to raise suspicions.

our terms may change on every month with an odd number of days. please review your contract for april and remember that a sudden change in appearance is in violation of the term that states

please for our consideration
do not cause concern
by displaying any indicator
of suicidal ideation, self-disdain
or plot therein containing self-destruction
we are a friend
we are your only friends

each month, you will be allotted a maximum of six days of exposed sunlight. as per medical advisory, please avoid taking advantage of these days as to not cause discrepancies among your chemical D3 balance. please sign on the line provided and see our secretary for proper payment plans.

day twenty-four

before
we begin,
a disclaimer
to disarm
feelings:

i am not a creation made in your likeness,
_________________________and as such
i think you should take note of my malfunctions
so that nothing will surprise you in the finale.

spoiler alert: i die in season three.
no, i'm not saying that you have a parameter of time
or that you can count the days
until you are free to move on,
but rather that i will get sick in autumn
and close my eyes in october.
this is okay because, like in the games we loved as kids,
you then have every right to loot my corpse;
here are my glasses and keychains,
here is my wristwatch that had a cog stick in 2008.
you never understood why i wore it afterwards
but it was to fool pedestrians into thinking
that i had a concept of time and priority,
that i had somewhere to go at noon and three-quarters.
i'm going to leave you the small things because,
and this is critical, they are the important parts of a person.
a man may grow to be seven feet tall,
may talk big and create words that are twelve syllables long;
he may try and exaggerate his kisses, he may lift you
off your toes when you kiss, but the sweeping gestures don't matter
nearly as much as the tiny things. so in october,
stripped of my clothes and glasses and wallet,
without my wristwatch or bracelets or necklaces,
i'd prefer you to find the picture of us
tucked behind the five dollar bills.
it's the smallest thing i can carry, and it very well sums up
all of our history together, our hundreds of thousands of words
and whispers and jokes when the lights are out
and we're lying face-to-face beneath a thin sheet
because it's summer on our island and the most adoring breeze
chills us both, shoulders and chests and bellies cuddled together
in a small gesture. it's how we both prefer it, i think.
no candles or incense--generally nothing that could catch fire
or set off the alarms. the scene is so small and simple
that this doesn't have to be a poem about love--
because really, no lips are touching, and it's summer
and we both know that my heart's going to wrap up its big number
in just a couple of months. since this isn't,
really, a poem about love, i don't feel the pressure
to end with a kiss.

day twenty-five

i conceived at such a young age
that as long as you hope
to have a voice--one that can sing
or trill or even make funny voices
so that your nephews will hold their sides
and laugh--you will fall into rebound
after each verb, you will lose a best friend
because of your lack of adjectives.
the idea has changed; think of it
how you think of the ice caps
or the way people style their hair.
if you hope to have a voice,
you have to prepare to lose all things
whether they're as tiny as a nephew's fingernails
or as sweeping as the pacific ocean.
if you want to be heard,
you have to sacrifice your poetry.
and really, in a world where verse is scarce
i could hardly pull the thread across my lips.

you can be the voice;
i'll listen from the hillside.

day twenty-six
also known as #gays bc @Insomnia

it is 2007
and we are on a beachfront in a creole country
that is made up of islands that all smell
like incense and open fires, roasting vegetables.
we are in the sand--just our toes and heels,
granules splashed against the fire-escape design
of our ankles. it is sundown and a great storm approaches
but you haven't left the beach yet; you haven't moved,
and i won't move without you. you say
i can pray away the storm
because humans have both willpower
and the power of will and one,
you're sure, will overtake the storm.
years later, you're the girl-next-door
who comes to my front porch each day
and asks is he okay
are the winds low today?
i remember once
telling you that the winds really,
really don't care how we want them to be,
how it made you fold your hands
and blink away tears like a child trying to be brave
at his father's funeral.
later you said that we could stand in the sand,
maybe even together like the old days
and you would show me how strong a girl can be,
even a little girl afraid of storms
because in your mind there is willpower
and the power of will, and don't you think
that just one of them could be enough?

day twenty-seven

years ago there was born a boy
who would cry when held by his parents,
though the touch of a stranger
wouldn't stir the first breath out of sync.
god put years into his head where there should have been months,
maybe even weeks. when he was six he cried
because his mother returned
his favorite christmas gift from his grandmother--
a purple dinosaur he named sham
because that was the name of his imaginary friend and he had a lisp.
when he cried for sham that night,
his father chided him for wanting a little girl's
toy and instead told him get angry
so angry that you can tackle this boy in front of you
so angry that you will make me proud.

years passed
and god began to spill decades into his head.
before long, the boy had always-headaches
and the doctors didn't know why.
that year was 1999, and the end of the world was just days away.
that year, his family didn't give christmas gifts,
but instead sat together in a room with hands held
and waited for a messiah.

six years and twenty-nine days later,
a teacher asked the boy why he stayed
in her room after school had ended,
but he could never find words to explain
i have no way home
i have no one to ride with but
i have friends
can't you see them here with us

day twenty-eight

my walls are covered with maps of the earth,
of my country, of states where they welcomed me
with a road guide and app card
that would show me exactly where i wanted to drink
after my gas ran out in a tiny town
and my stomach was emptied of beer.
there's this one where kentucky is sprawled out
so you can see pictures of the attractions;
here is the south's biggest waterfall,
here is lincoln's home, and here
in the corner is this town called cape
where i met the most beautiful sunflower
who had ever shared a drink with a poor stranger.
she had the most everliving blue eyes and hands
that could create such unbelievably sweet words,
that could draw three lines and create a hillside
where we would live quietly for the remainder of our lives.
she said if i could fill her new countryside with words
that our world would be perfect and self-contained
with always-fresh vegetables and berries so sweet
that you couldn't bite into them without smiling,
your cheeks reddening with an unnamed emotion.
we would awake in the middle of the night
when the other stopped breathing,
gave one another new life because the old one
had simply rotted away into the furled branches
of elder pain. when the day came
when we would close our eyes together,
i found my eyelids incapable of shutting;
i screamed and reached out in desperation
as the light faded from her petals.
all the words i had woven into the cornflower sky
began to fall as bombshells, upheaving her gorgeous soil
with raucous blasts. in a single night, our nation fell to its knees,
leaving a poor man to wander across maps plastered to his walls.

day twenty-nine

i hear they're opening a superstore where our house used to be. it may be cool, i think, to walk around and stare at a shelf full of drills and screwdrivers and say the mirror looks different this morning. there'll be games where we planted our tomato vines, maybe a few lawn chairs in our bedroom; people are sitting there, watching our bed, and they wonder why the sheets ain't messy.

right now, there are cranes and bulldozers mulling over the soil; i can stand on the side of the road and watch them haul over the place we'd buried dead pets. there are skid marks on the road from the nights the beer changed your words in my ears into hateful things, words the good wife would never say. i wonder if you think of those nights when the truck's engine would drown out the cicadas, when the screech of tires would burn through your sobs like anchors through bay waters.

the fellas gather around me and all pop open a cold one. it's a shame, one says. it's a shame.

if you want to hear something funny, then remember how for our first date i set up a big-ass projector on top of my truck and played a movie for us against the dirty wall of the old pharmacy. it was casablanca, and the grime on the jimmied screen put lumps on bogart's face. the town loved that idea so much that they opened up a drive-in theater in that parking lot that plays old movies every friday night. i went to it once last month and saw rear window and thought of you and how you'd move your lips to the lines you had memorized. if i didn't know better, i'd say that i cried a little; we both know that ain't true, though.

whichever way the wind blows, i doubt this letter'll be around long. the man on tv says all heaven's gonna fall out tonight. i guess it's one of the things you might like most about sleeping under the stars at night; sometimes you get a summer breeze, sometimes you get all the rain in the state. if it ain't been obvious from the last few letters, i really am sorry about that leak. pastor said it ain't my fault, but you may not believe it--maybe even less than i do. but until i get an answer in my dreams or prayers, maybe some kinda metaphor that lands on my hand. maybe a butterfly or hornet; make one of 'em mean you hear me. until then, here's lookin' at you.

day thirty
the finale

true love is never ambivalent,
though it can be a joke between best friends
and also a spiritual anchor between los angeles and westport;
and if you really look into its guts, into the parts
that make it more than just affection or attraction
you begin to wonder how true our joke is.
i can imagine that if you don't believe in true love,
then it definitely can't be ambivalent because
there's no water between two boys who have never seen the pacific;
maybe there's no space between those two boys at all.
if we can agree that true love isn't a thing,
if our bright eyes and mended lungs grew in four years by happenstance,
or if a garden of jonquils can bloom after a cold snap without care;
then i can trust with you that we make our own emotion.
it may be stitched together of scraps leftover by a sad boy,
one who towered over all your friends, and it may be salvaged
from an opera singer whose voice is stronger than the southern heat,
but in its fullness we are really not so different from the romantics and poets
and people who lay down their lives for the person they love.
true love is never ambivalent, and sometimes it doesn't exist;
as long as we can agree, we can make the rest worth a try.