from Dear Gone
It’s almost like we still lie to each other
but it’s just me now. In your inventories, several light bulb jokes I wrote myself. In your inventories, it is too dark to read. In your inventories, I was 9 granite columns, pulled up the Nile by slaves. I held fast, a sky overcast with crackling leather, polished in the reduction of another man’s labor. to dust. I was the Technicolor contrast on the version of the story I can relate to. It is full of bullet holes & I would just like you to know that I had my little hopes once, too. & now. The least you can do is tell me, was it as satisfying as we imagined, to make every ounce of traitorous flesh finally pay for itself.
Now that you live inside my head like a god I never wanted
Let’s build a ruins of the sky. Just to deface it.
Just to see our image in stone, crumble.
Remember the time we made each other from molding floorboards
of basements the commode flooded once a week & some disgruntled father in five day shadow, angry at having to abandon the engine in its perpetual need or the guns’ endless polishing or the nerveless tangles of tackle-wire would sludge through all that human pollute of— what other life could we have known? Remember all the tornadoes we were in each other’s lives & the whole time we were hiding in that basement, neither of our homes, drinking warm orange pop, kissing on the brown corduroy couch, watching movies about how real the devil, my arms snaked around you? & all the time the sirens wailing outside the storm screaming like it’s inside our mouths when our mouths are in each other & how are there enough places to hide shouldn’t everyone else be hiding from the storm but there were just enough. for us. to keep hiding & hiding.
We, the lucky ones.
Almost, human
We leapt at the waves, were knocked to shore over & over. Almost anyone will use you, if you love them enough. We were like a certain failure to develop, abandoned cul de sacs, a ruinous concrete where kids knocked each other’s teeth out. Don’t get me started on the crick that ran mostly dry, the horror that passes for the precious child. Pass from one life to another, one lover to. It’s all replaceable. We’re on that next level shit where no one can touch us.
A terrible prayer wrings the knees to rags, rags to
a terrible elevation. Makes the dead animals on the basement walls smile. Moves the hides of the walls, of each forced grin carcass of a wild tamed, of whole futures we still dream— if you chew the stems from my hands like the disfigurement of every 3 am that passes for what will never rest now. I pour like water, in the form of a dress that unravels between us
Grey Vild is a Queer Art Mentorship & Brooklyn Poets fellow & a MFA candidate in poetry at Rutgers University. His work can be found at Them, Vetch, Harriet: The Blog and elsewhere.