sin is all that you have to show for yourself



i tell the room this like a wound that will not close
like a clock wound until it forgets itself
the ceiling remembers my name and repeats it like ash
possibility is a river that runs its palms against the rocks
and the rocks do not answer
they are quiet as teeth
your absence is a feathered hand that comes at dusk
and takes small things from me the way rain takes paper
i wake and find my right hand gone
then my left hand gone
i learn to braid regret with my remaining sleeves
i have not written in a while
i keep my mouth full of winter like a bird full of glass
i swallow the horizon and the horizon keeps breathing without me
dreaming is a house with all its rooms open to a black sea
i walk the halls and leave footprints that do not dry
there is a photograph i cannot touch
in it you are not mine and you are very alive
the light on your jaw looks like a small blade
i press my palm where your chest must be
and there is only cold plaster where your heartbeat used to be
i learn the grammar of wanting without verbs
i build altars of ash in the corners of my ribs
sometimes i think of cutting the moon in half to give you one side
sometimes i think of stealing the word tomorrow and welding it to your name
the city keeps its promises badly
it throws up laundromats and neon and still asks for my confession
i give it my sins like coins
they clatter like small saints in a rat hole
you are a moth with a ribbon for a wing and i am a lamp that remembers you
i reach and the reaching becomes a map of scars
there is a river in my mouth and i am learning to speak it fluently
my voice is a stone skipping with terrible persistence
my hands are islands swallowed by tides they helped invent
love is a rumor that scratches at the window in the night
it says your name wrong and i forgive it
my skin remembers the outline of having been complete
my bones are a ledger of losses neat as a confession
i walk through my own sentences and find they are empty rooms
i leave a trail of cigarette ash like a sarcophagus of small things
i keep believing we will be something else
a garden for the living or a cathedral for ghosts
i keep believing and the belief eats me politely
it eats me the way light eats daughterless rooms
it eats me the way a feathered hand chops at a tree
slowly and with an almost tender precision
if you are the sea i am the shore made of paper
i fold myself into boats and set them on fire to know the direction of desire
when the boats go down they bring back your name on their lips
and i cannot tell if that is mercy or a sentence
dreaming is how i keep you nearby like a smuggled bird
dreaming is how i lose pieces of myself and call them offerings
there is a night without punctuation where i confess everything
all the small betrayals like coins placed at the foot of a drowned statue
and still i reach for the one thing i cannot have
like a child who keeps pressing his face to a train window
watching the trees move away in a slim white city of regret
my chest is a room where your absence keeps the lamp lit
sin is all that remains and also the language i use to name you
i keep writing as if writing could stitch my hands back on
as if words could act as sutures or as levers
as if by saying you i could make you arrive
but you are the weather that never learns my name
you are a door that opens only to other people’s rooms
i sleep with my hands folded so the feathered hand cannot take any more
i wake with them empty and full at once
like pockets after confetti
like a bird that remembers the shape of a mountain and cannot climb it
i will continue to say your name like a litany and like a wound
and the room will repeat it until it becomes prayer or indictment or both