Late night drunk
on the ghostly bones
of a red wire
wrapped around my finger
wrapped around my
consciousness
disarmed but ticking
still.

Late night and
dreaming of ringlets
scented like flowers
vanilla skin,
a fascination
with death
dying
and dissection.

All these years
creeping through my bones
slowly disused aqueducts
that fed some other lifetime
streams of
streams of consciousness. 

These days more out of sorts than ever
a thief to lock pick in lockstep
with the bass and the tremble of
modern collapse,
a short stack of train wrecks,
fingers gliding over indices,
I pluck all the letters of your name
squirrel them away
make sure you never go
unspelled
unensorceled
make sure you never
go quite where you thought
the song would take you.
Some days
I just make sure you go. 
You are an ache
in the tips of my fingers
the bones protesting winter,
the body remembering spring,
the heart replete and ready
to fall.

Every week
you slide out of your skin.
Frozen in the strobe light
there is
discarded upon the ground
the smoking husk
of self conscious 
self awareness.
We look for ways out
that traverse the uncomfortable echo
of the world that made us.
We look for connections
in hungry ghosts
and hungry strangers.
We find and lose again
the self beneath the sound. 

When I unwound the cables
I forgot what I would lose.
Last night, with cracked, dry lips
I dreamed I drank you empty
all the starlight from your skin
leaking out
through the bit of black ribbon
tied around your neck,
like a wound or a wish for slumber,
pooling and splashing
inside your princess gown.
Now the vision of you rides me
distorts and distracts, 
cannot be found again
is relentlessly difficult
to summon or subdue
and so I see the hidden cost
of unwinding things at all.
Last night, with cracked, dry lips
I spoke your name in solitude,
drank ghosts,
blacked out,
and cannot decide
if that invocation 
was inappropriate
or deepest praise 
blushing and unheard.