Calling a Wolf a Wolf

I am not a slow learner I am a quick forgetter such erasing makes one voracious if you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

I'm becoming more a vessel of memories than a person it's a myth / that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out / when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves / in books love can be war-ending a soldier drops his sword / to lie forking oysters into his enemy's mouth in life we hold love up to the light / to marvel at its impotence

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This may be me at my best

I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want

my body follows me around asking for things. I try to think louder, try to be brilliant, wildly brilliant.

I have been so careless with the words I already have. I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light. I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight. How is school going, Kaveh-joon? Delam barat tang shodeh. Are you still drinking? Shab bekheir. For so long every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.

I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent,

All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.

when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck

I'm learning how much of myself I don't actually need

I’ve given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me both of us ruined and unrecognizable two coins on a train track the train crushed into one.

my body burned like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire but fire was on everything

Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body

When I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do

Will I ever even know when my work is done? I'm almost ready to show you the mess I've made

Much of being alive is breaking

That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science

I am glad I still exist glad for cats and moss and Turkish indigo and yet to be light upon the earth to be steel bent around an endless black to once again be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet

...so how shall I live now in the unexpected present I spent so long in a lover's quarrel with my flesh the peace seems over- cautious too-polite

Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying

The barbarism of eating anything seems almost unbearable

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars separated by billions of miles, light traveling years to die in the back of an eye.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

If you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

Now it's lonely all over

it's a long drive into manhood but such a short walk out

Some people don’t even want to drink, aren’t tempted by the pools of liquor all around them. This seems a selfishness. God loves the hungry more than the full. Faith is a story about people totally unlike you building concrete walls around their beds. Behind each of their faces: a slowly dying animal. Do you feel summoned? Do you feel heaven closing itself to you like a clamshell snapping shut?