I look past the light bulb, I see straight through the glowing glass and focus everything that i have inside of me on the crack in your wall, Travis. We’ve finished now. It’s over now. You say that you forgot what that was like and i roll my eyes a little and you smile. I remember every line in my sight, because, it might’ve just been me or the both of us, or just that lamp in front of the wall with the crack, or the way your glasses never seem to fit you right when we first meet — with your left leg bent and the way you place one shoe on top of the other, grinning and your hair falling in your face, hands in the back pockets, mind on the show of the universe as you fix my collar even though it doesn't need to be adjusted — I just don't want to forget this moment, your ethereal presence, the way you bring your hand to the side of my face.

(a performance, a show for your watching, a philosophy you found on the back of a sugar packet and took to heart — made a mantra of — meditated on for hours until a conceptual insight of language&art took form to make you shudder in the bathroom and smile in your sleep)

or it may have been the way we were just holding each other, the way i could feel your warm sides on my cold shoulders, the curve of your teeth&smile, rise and fall of your chest with your breath, smiling at the same time when we noticed the moments we were breathing in unison, it could’ve just been the fact that i was breathing again and i knew it

you were breathing again and i knew it

and we were alive again, it could’ve been the warm spring thursday afternoon and the rabbits fucking in the backyard beneath trees with purple flowers or just the girl who was singing “take ecstasy with me, baby” over the stereo.

i’m not sure what it was exactly, travis, i just wanted to remember it and you. the two of us. because i fell in love with the notion of what could’ve been, what we almost had. what i feel like i might’ve destroyed. that i must have misplaced or lost the map of the place that i was trying to get to. a lot of things travis.

i hated you, i hate you, ha.ha.ha.

i think it’s this weird duality of feelings for you that keeps me coming back. travis, you’re the only person who can read my mind even when you don't want to, and travis, sometimes i just have to tell you everything and if you ever ask me i’ll call it all a carefully planned story that you were never meant to know and the thought of names changed to protect not even taking shape in your mind you’ll just say “oh” and i’ll say “yea” and i’ll go back to trying my hardest to remember you.

‘cause you are just a ghost. you were hit by a car years ago. they found you on the side of the road. they put your body in a blue bag, cold lips, called your name over the speakers at school, and i remembered your old man and imagined him having to imagine them zipping it shut like a zip-lock sandwich bag, empty of air and your grace, and he was crying into his big hands travis, on the chair in that cold living room that he knew we were learning too much about each other in, the living room with the vague lighting that you had told me that you believed you were sometimes underneath, and there was all this innocent hope for the world in your eyes, but i couldn’t hear your father sobbing because i was sort of thinking about how our hands — shaking with the fear of new found intimacy, like we had just invented the idea of touching itself — met one afternoon on that chair and we were okay with that: holding hands; belonging, being ourselves and being someone conscious for the first time, being alive, or just: being with each other, together...

and we had been laying together the night before the car took you round the corner bloodying your knees with scabs turning your shins into scraped red jagged edges browned greened infections and burn of black rocks that smelt like irons on skin when you jumped out of your body and automatically grew wings.

and i held you as if it all had or had not had happened. you halved me because i halved you, we ate the whole, and loved again. tingles down your spine, roses in the mirrors, electric lines in the wind soon to be barley visible when the trees have bloomed. hat hair in front of eyelashes, kisses underneath the sink while on adderall, piano strokes and the rest.

oh, and the crack in the wall, of course.

you said “you’re trying to remember all of this, aren’t you?” and that caught me off guard, and i guess you could see it in my face because you laughed and said “cause i am too,” and i laughed because it was funny travis, it was funny and you laughed harder so i did too.

and when we were finished, when it was still funny but we didn’t have the laugh in us for another round you sighed and said “i love how — when we’re like this — i mean,”

and i laughed again, and you took a breath to start again,

“i mean — what i’m trying to say is — when we’re like this,” squeezing, “i love how i can really feel like i can be myself.”

and i saw it all fold itself up like
a piece of paper into different squares
until it was all small enough to be
placed in a back pocket. i saw it
all in someone else’s back pocket and
it was slowly walking away from me,
until i realized that i was just passing it
on the street, that i just happened
to see the secret map before being put
away neatly for safe keeping on the
street by a traffic light, until i could
see that we were going in opposite
directions on the street, that you
were going to where i had just come from.


and in the corner of my eye i saw it happening. i saw the slow bleeding in the cracks. i knew it was coming. calmly, “the crack in your wall travis," i said, motioning in its direction.

you laughed, “what about it?”

“i think,” i said sitting up, “I think there’s something coming out of it.”

“what?” and you looked up at it and followed its meandering path to the wall by the lamp “what the hell is that?” and we both got out of bed and didn’t care about being naked.

the crack in the wall was crying
where is the water coming from?
the walls, the walls are soaking
while water is slowly rolling down
the wallpaper making it
look like its sobbing
or throbbing
jolting
shaking
i don’t think they will last much longer
and i held you while the house exploded,

and we floated over the city we loved in
watching the small people cutting their lawns
or driving in their cars
playing a million different songs on
a million different radios
turned up with the windows down
the roofs of buildings
the houses of all our friends and the
reflection of the sun in street glass.

flooded rivers with muddy banks and rushing water and the huge hole in the side of the house that our prison used to be. in a room with a bed whose underneath was the hiding place for a shoebox that was the hiding place of precious pieces of memories: a candy wrapper, some shoe laces, an old picture from a time before, a button, flower seeds, a penny, a yellow marble, and a certain charm from a certain necklace:

a circle with one half black and one half white; not split down the direct center. a wavy line instead. a dot of each in the other.

good in evil
liberty in repression
freedom in between four walls
coughs in kisses
yawns in smiles
right and wrong
what’s night during day
my hate, my love
your lies, your truth

and i just let go of you and fell back to the earth,