Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I made a list of everything that haunted the dark:

  1. The sensation of watching the body of your lover at rest
  2. The way death and dying cannot ever be equivalent
  3. The tiring nature of desperation
  4. The idea that a misalignment in trajectory can be worse than the light after a heavy rain
  5. Places on this earth where nothing happens & how this is not one of them
  6. The geocosmic violence of the night penetrating into the day
  7. The gradual dissolution of humanity courtesy of this telluric rock
  8. The tension that can be found between two points at any given time
  9. Virginal ineptitude
  10. How misery never accompanies the instant.

I’m trying to forget about everything.

My palms are pricked by the thorns of the rose that lies on the floor next to the bed. I try to navigate to a locked room at the end of the hallway with my eyes shut. This is the height of devotional obsession. Everyone makes bad decisions, but to hinge an identity on the idea of a deserved pleasure predicates the insistence that you’re worth it more than anyone else. I whisper to the body I think I find in the dark before laughing maniacally at god. If there were anyone else in the house they’d be away now. I laugh until I black out and dream about memorizing lines of verse.

Thoughts dissolving like clouds / glass windows reflecting only the dark of night / run your hands through my hair