where we watched sunsets

afterschool we climbed up the music building and [[watched sunsets]]

and cried on each other's shoulders before we built up cathedrals from where they once stood. [[☀]]

and then with hands tied you kiss and kiss in the concrete palm down head down where no one else can see us [[☀->2]]

and one day you say what if we [[leap]] down the house we would have built. yes, leap before everyone in the schoolyard our bones on display and iphone 5s facedown all over the gym floor

by habit i think about you when those moments of time slow down, even when they're not you we race down and slide with socks on i sing you a song [[☀->3]]

first place your palms on mine, compare hands, compare stories, the ages of your sisters whom i memorize before mine [[☀->4]]

(and of course while the sun alone is up in the primelight) we say this is more time than we need. like few we're in this for a forever. [[☀->5]]

i kiss you in the passage, when bleeding, when liberty is a word, the sky indistinct, or your sea in a memory. at sixteen i wanted to engulf you. press not rib but chin, sink and tell you the wife i want and for you the skirt you will wear. the clean walls in your bedroom. the cross of jesus on mine. [[☀->6]]

and i lie on my mattress facing jesus on the ceiling: his birth and death repeated to me. on my balcony i weave eastern destiny eternal die [[☀->7]]

i was fifteen when i wrote you my vows i pretend you are dead [[☀->8]]

are you standing above me? myself disintegrated, renewed, here and all the same. what is true today if not my nothingness? i may be small and alone, never at once. matthew, i'm heavier now. i carry the anointed and my family; if not the men who have come and left. [[☀->9]]

//2017 or so, two years after the poem// your father-lacerated hands drag alleyways your words, rapt, tighter, hollow, arsenile i want my new boys high and gaiety i want a funeral and a pricetag and your ash on it [[☀->10]]

and how could i have loved to lose? and how do i not remember you? we, immaculate, legs-on-lap catholic school gaze holy. you told me to stop eating the broken bread and to stop the killing (once was enough) and i regained light. with the saints who baptized me and the satan who left me and the alcohol you promised ingested in everything i took from you and i write you back and i write you your elegy and i write you your letters and know no one but you. your father hungers and i tend to our quiet, my mother knows and i promise her that this will end as everything does. [[☀->11]]

Constantine, I dream of you pin-pricked, gored from the inside. Press your forehead against mine. Feel me enunciate each tiny praise. Acacia gone or chopped or barely left with room to breathe where your father taps the cigarette ash and lighter and where I burnt your skin this is softer than the next world Mary like your promise like the better one of you like how you liked little girls until I was the littlest enough before real became true and you were just poor enough to wait quietly John like your enemy and the belly of the beast you were to split open and how we two could watched the world knees down under cradled biology and bones and the baroque he was close enough for you to imprison fine enough to let go [[☀->12]]

our sisters are not sisters they could be dreams and with you the most tangible feeling was when you slipped out of my fingertips imagine picking a star, a country, a war, a bird then palming it so close and then you taught me how to breathe and perhaps how to love and the persistence of power and the ease of its loss