Red stays on the tip of my tongue
because I think I’ll always burn.

(Fly away with me.
We’re seared sensory memories.)

No matter how much I look to the sky,
I taste skin and life and salt.

Secondary similes roar in the dark,
leaving vestiges of civility behind
like snipped topiaries.
No one seems to notice
but still the winds shift subtly
and a storm knows it’s being summoned.
Flayed feelings of regret and confusion
have no place in the new world,
where questions are set aside
like abandoned principles,
and color matters more than taste
but less than the song about it all.
Whatever monster makes the dark its home
cannot hold sway
over a tree that bends and returns to standing.

They’ve begun to turn you,
those reflections – shimmering
grease and insect carcasses and rain.
Somewhere below your field of vision,
the place you know you belong
but deny its existence waits
to claim your sweet decay.
Filth is comfort, pain is familiar,
knowledge is a luxury belonging to Eden.
Open, friend, and swallow the air
such as it is- it doesn’t get much better
than the alley after a rain.