Carneece

my life is a collection of corpses and constellations of ghosts and guerrilla warfare. they cauterized my arteries but it didn't matter, my veins were already empty. i'm pickpocketing your gossamer secrets and keeping them in my back pocket like cheap jewelry; the kind of gold and silver that washes off in salt water. my life is a collection of corpses and constellations of ghosts and guerrilla warfare, but you change that. you melt me down to something viscuous and boil my blood. you're a tear gas grenade and you're always sculpting me where i'm most pliable, bendable, malleable. you catch me by surprise like needles in my eyes.

just sleep, take another pill. just sleep, life's lost its thrill. just sleep,   through the next meal. just sleep, tumbling downhill. just sleep, covers fight the chill. just sleep until you're still.

  Sleep a tsetse fly drinks its next meal amazing shrieks the sun, newborn crying, is sky ilk under a maze of feathery canopy; the Bandundu forest, gives birth to a litter of bananas- grass covered savannahs, stubborn windblown maize yearningly sways to the river, where water walking fish farmer casts a drowsy eye on a school of tilapia playing in his bamboo den; a kihuta viper opens its razor mouth and belly, fresh meat wafting through endless horizon; while decadent sockets, hanging by swollen neck, sway as he is carried to the garden. Burial grounds burn slowly like an old antelope pulses, waiting to

Once upon a Sunday, I saw god and she looked like you – moon-eyed insomnia collecting sleep-dust at the elbows, rusting ball-joints. She chewed the chalk-lit skies as they curved chromatic into my stiff yellow collarbones, and swept up the night. She was busy setting suns and settling the air, but she took the time to answer my prayer in lullaby tones. "Sleep is wrong", she said, simply. And I agreed. Because alone, I see you clearer – hiding behind your rag doll physics as you rip one day from the next with the kiss of death- in-life, you shallow breather. Caught on the cusp of your muchness, I have always been your

I've been drunk on half sleep for four days now, I know the underbelly of morning, the way five o'clock smells. I've been painting insomniac birds on the ceiling, perpetually in flight, their eyes half shut with no chance of change. I thought I saw you through the moon roof on Thursday night, when I drove to the water to watch the geese sleep, the ships lay down on dry dock, the train hush up the engine. Last night I tried to hold to your sheets, your shirts, but the bed turned into pin-pricks, my eyes wide flashlights until dawn.