-Cursive

It's like slow-dancing with a plane crash. Unbuckle that clumsy seatbelt and crawl from the emergency door, balance along a wing while the jet turbines make a shrieking dissonance of the atmosphere, and flames lick and curl around making noises like flapping cloth. Calmly look down at the patchwork of land that spirals like a passed-out ferris wheel, and take one last look at the flight that almost took your life right into the ground, screaming and on fire. Then take one last press of your feet on the wing and feel the grit from endless nameless pinpricks of airborne flotsam before pushing your strong legs and freeing yourself. The heat recedes and ends up slamming into an area that no one cares about. You're still airborn and the air is cool and clean. The clouds taste metallic.

All these old things /

that I'll never be /

that I'll never miss.

This is the time when all things old will pass /

inertia comes around.

-The Exies

The innocence sheds away like dismembered parachute; shys like smoke, and I'm left with something still so sharp and vulnurable, a fragile blade, a cobalt-blue hollowpoint made of glass. Packed with gunpowder, mixed with sands from a beach I walked on when I was younger - the sand stuck to my small toes and came off somewhere between when I said that I loved and when I said that I had fucked up. I didn't know what I wanted but it came to me anyway, in the dull heat of summer or the secret swell of body heat in winter. I've got the marks of a hundred fingers on my body, and I still pick kisses out. I know where all of them are, and from whom, and I will travel until my passport is faded and disintegrates in my weathered palms.

"Oh, this relief, it's the oddest thing, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god" -Xiu Xiu

I come down and land on my feet, knees bending and almost hitting earth before I stand, dust sliding off invisible spheres about me. I've landed in a humbled jumble of limbs in you, and your hum of security curls in the corners of my vision and smoothes edges, soothes vendettas. This is it - I've come to collapse in you, and it has never felt better. Oh, this relief.

"Hold my hand / don't think it's dumb

and say my name

when you come." -Dykehouse

Every exhale a sweet sliver of praise, every inhale a shaky drawing of the same air you've breathed, the same skin again but back to it, and the same reckless, serene full collapse into your spires, hollowed-out secret chambers, and gradiated bumps and swells of your body. This isn't what I expected. This is everything I wanted. Oh, thank you, thank you, says this secret hymn, repeated forever and ever by a breathless voice that can only say your name once.

Bliss fullcircles and turns and before I close my eyes I already know you'll save me from the wreckage. These touches are offerings, these kisses are due, and your eyes follow me down, down, and I cannot look away. I would never want to.