i.
cup your hands around your ear / listen for home / wait for the echoing volley / when you dream / do you press your hand against the never-night sky / and believe it is yours to mould / because i cremated desire / before it could trip off my tongue / like sin / like hope / the undead responsibilities we fail to keep in this eternal summer / to survive enough so our silence doesn’t scream / but to die enough to call the ghost town home

ii.
banged the gavel / too much hell but we can fix you civilise you purify you / scalpeled us into purgatory / razed down the tears either i cried or they robbed me of one more time / and i unlearned the difference between please may i borrow and this was always mine / so home and i / run inverse to each other / like dead currents / like water in my palms / like my father’s father’s father where one never knew the other / untethered from drowned boats and forgotten tongues

iii.
now / with my hand on / your unshifting ribcage / be honest to me if it’s the first and last time / swear upon the rivers you pressed the heads of your promises into / until they lay quiet, no effervescence / did you leave them under the streetlight / and did you tell them that rotting yellow-gold / was their true north