somethingsophie

i. they asked me if there was something of yours that I wanted to keep I wanted to keep your eyelashes, your breath, your blood I said this, and they looked sad, said they meant did I want your clothes and possessions, your things I didn't know what I wanted cradling my head with my arms and quietly saying no over and over my mouth dry with the taste of morning sickness and old seawater a month later, I wanted all your clothes I was scrub-faced and tired the yellow of the walls hurt my eyes, buried in wet towels, sleeping naked on the floor every night ii. I fucked somebody else after the funeral "somebody else" sound

          remind yourself that you have two speaking lungs     beautifully uttering orchestrated sharp and flat     shifting in your diaphragm     remind yourself that your body is a work of art;     even as you are standing still, you are painting through     the indigo of your veins and the vermilion of your arteries;     do not fret for the stains on your skin do not take anything     away and in fact stand as a testament, an apotheosis     of the bubble-fragile buoyancy of your finite flesh     remind yourself that you have one breathing tongue;     an animated work with every flick, click, and lick     with it you write

how can you save someone with tattoos and track marks? they called him Jesse and I loved him, I loved him too much for my own good. he was a burnt-out angel with weathered grandfather wings and an aluminum halo. "please," I begged, incessant, "please, stop. you're better than this." I wrestled with his addiction as though it was my own, destroyed syringes straight from the crook of his elbows. I always knew he had one true love, and it sure wasn't me. his arm was pale and thin around my shoulders, pale and thin in the masquerade lamplight, where he pierced his veins in belt-constricted solitude. one night, as I paced with his bent silve

                                              {the words that let go of                                               their letters tangle and tumble                                               in foxtrots and viennese trances                                               to and fro                                               and he takes hold of me}                                               i am roses after rainfall                                               blushing in almost-autumn air                                                             as your forehand faintly taps                                          

don’t drop your ellipses on your freckled-with-pity walk out of our sentence. I have only been taming your paragraphs into stanzas. don’t let your rosy chest-wings quit just yet. breathe, my love, find a sinus rhythm in your sporadic juxtaposed days; there is a typo error in your impulsive ways and i’m afraid that is more editing than i’m used to. let’s uncapitalize those articles, it all starts from there breathe, you must silence yourself. page break, turn it over, skim a reading, halt that anger and filter those strong homophone-leaves; I am trying too. let your grown-out hair lay free for once instead of

i. Measured only with the vague eras of shoes, an empire with a beautiful name. ii. While I sleep the cat slips in and out of the room in the same way rain and sun overlap. iii. A cup of water trembles for days on my desk. Even though I am thirsty I am afraid to drink it. Dust has collected, made strange patterns on the water. I am the only one who lives here, so it is my dust. What about myself am I so afraid of?

in 1886, Sigmund Freud employed free association; the idea that a sick patient, terminally crippled with a nameless plague, could list off the reasons why his bed sheets had holes in them. paraphrased: the art of free speech. my mouth is a gun and your name is a shooting range. damp grass, our backs, semantics. the psychoanalysts say we establish long-term memory by stringing it all with prior meaning. a flurry of sweatshirts and ripped jeans, stroking skin in sign language only lovers speak. hands, tongue, everything else. Freud said that sometimes, a cigar is only a cigar. i tell him how smoke spilled from your mouth into mine.